On days like today I stand under the shower for as long as I can. I crank the water up as high as it will go, so that the sensation of heat and scalding water on my back, neck and shoulders eventually becomes as noticeable as the dull roar of pain beneath my skin. I do my physical therapy exercises, which I know help, but at the moment feel like ripping muscle off of bone.
Sometimes, as I stand there, my skin an angry shade of hot pink, I’ll cry a little, because what else am I supposed to do?
No one prepared me for this. At my prestigious liberal arts school, my parents paid nearly $40k a year for me to learn the things I’d supposedly need to survive the world, more than survive it, to conquer it, do whatever it was I wanted and craft my life to be how I wanted it through a combination of hard work, being nice to people and being innately slightly more intelligent than the norm.
There were no courses on this in my first Masters program either. While we debated how to change the world whilst resuscitating a long dead artistic medium, none of us stopped to think that something so simple and primal as physical pain would be the thing that stopped us in our tracks.
I can tell you a lot of things. I can quote Shakespeare, I can sing in German, I can tell you exactly how to spend $25K in advertising to promote the touring production of CATS for a four-show sit down at the Civic Center in Abilene, Texas. I can tell you a plethora of methods for teaching multiplication to 8 year olds who don’t speak English. I am a font of knowledge, most useless, and was led to believe from an early age that this plus a desire to work myself stupid was what was going to ensure that everything would turn out exactly the way I wanted it to, forever and ever Amen.
I cannot tell you how to deal with this. I can teach you stuff to buy to slather on your tight, throbbing muscles, books to read and things you shouldn’t eat to try and make the best of what is basically an untenable situation. But I can’t yet tell you how to really deal with this. Days like today, I can’t even tell you how to begin to try.
Cat Hair Tumbleweeds 