My spine spun out of its tidy tracks. In the aftermath of my sedentary pandemic, it acted out, and sparked its way up and down my sciatic nerve path for many years. Through this, my body reframed itself.
In the doctor’s office, I was asked to project my pain and record it onto another visualization of a body on paper. The abstraction of these symbols was at once clinical and visceral. My chronic pain felt like a brutal assignment, marked permanently upon my body as a chart.
Suddenly, my body wasn’t a brunt force I willed around. I wasn’t a sack of bones. My old derogatory simplifications of physicality, my jokes about dehydration, my neglect in muscle, found a new punchline: a moderate L5-S1 herniation, broad-based, stubborn, though not in need of surgery.
After injury, I was struck by how little I knew about my spine and my nervous system – a central channel for both mobility and feeling, bundling a highway of nerves to reach all my limbs. A provocation at the control center would have the power to send nerve pain through our limbs, trigger and lock muscles along the route, and emit false signals throughout. These are its levers:
I came to know these very well. These were the marks we would write in the doctor’s office: tingling was ice cold water trickling in your leg. numbness was a perpetual funny bone trigger. sparks, sparks. muscle pain was an old, familiar friend.
Our modern life roots our life, work, and chatter in digital worlds. Tangibility is measured in clicking, actions execute at the “speed of thought” now, and numbers are the governing abstraction. It is both elevated, a feat of invention, and naive.
It is naive to think that we are immune to being pulled, brutally, back into our bodies.
From the haywire of pain, I was shocked to find my body anew. Sciatica and a constant vigilance to nerve sensations brought me to both abstract my own form into signals, and embody the feelings that were within.
I read my body like a map, and I felt pain and sensation as symbols. Localized pain in the back meant it was a good signal. Traveling pain down my leg was the sign of a flare-up. It wrote to me. I was pulled back.
My body is fragile; some things will never recover; many things are made only once; and some consequences will live on forever.
My body is a genius; it is shockingly resistant; it is a tightly wound, impossibly intricate; it can give magic powers like sight, hearing, movement, dancing, art; it is made of science not one person on earth can completely wrap their minds around. It gets better.