Pain

7

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The summer of my twelfth year, while scanning mom and dad’s growing self-help library, I grab a book titled Dying to Live, by Tolly Burkan, the founder of the international fire-walking movement. In early June, the family attended his workshop in Canada and on the last evening, the attendees were invited to participate in a fire walk. It sounded like magic to me. I’d heard of walking on water but that was reserved for the guy I learned about while occasionally attending Sunday school with Jenny and reading bits of the Bible to appear normal to her family. But fire walking? Tolly’s bright blue eyes, lit with his own internal fire, evangelized his message for ordinary people like me — if you can walk on fire, you can do anything. Through sharing his own story of suffering and transformation, Tolly’s recipe for happiness and freedom sounded so easy and fire-walking was his vehicle. Pay attention. Expect the best. Go for it. 

I was too young, and they had rules about youth “going for it,” so I watched mom, dad and Eric join the others as they ungracefully scooted across hot coals.

I didn’t inspect everyone’s feet the next morning, but charred flesh wouldn’t dissuade me. I was obsessed. Tolly was my first introduction to the “human potential” movement and those two, insignificant words shoved together in my brain were like an alcoholic’s first sip of beer. 

In his book, I learn that fire-walking is an exercise in relaxing the body and mind so that the perception of pain is simply an intense sensation, not good or bad. He claims that if our brains react with “Yikes, you’re in danger,” we are more likely to get burned, and those who are able to remain relaxed complete their walk unscathed.

My thoughts and state of mind can determine my physical reality? I’m thrilled — the vaccine to an unpredictable, painful world right inside my own head. I search my memory for all the times I experienced pain. Stomach aches — bad. Dog bites, corrective orthodontics bites, Eric’s perfected Spock bites (also known as the Vulcan Nerve Pinch)—bad, bad, bad. Can I really have ultimate control over it all? It seems only natural to judge an intense sensation or experience as bad and try to figure out how to avoid it. But Tolly is telling me something different. He is saying I can diminish the power that pain has over my life. He’s telling me I’m in control. 

I close the book triumphantly and make a plan. If I’m too young to firewalk, then I‘ll do the next best thing.

Being goofy with dad is another, less compulsive way I learn to manage angst.

School is out. Most summer days are spent splashing in Lake Winnebago with Jenny, building miniature kingdoms from cardboard and found objects (with Jenny), and playing with dolls and ignoring impending puberty (with Jenny). Everything I do is with Jenny. We have been inseparable since our first secret, shoe-lace tying race in first grade. So I’m not certain why I am alone on this early summer day when I march my twelve year old limbs outside with a mission. I decide that I need to walk barefoot around the perimeter of the house and throw my coltish feet at the hard, petrified wood stumps that create a walking path down to the lake. I am used to being barefoot most summers and am proud of my tomboy callouses. This experiment is a way for me to prove that I’m in control of my body.

Pay attention. Expect the best. Go for it. 

I throw my right foot with as much force as I can toward the edge of the rock-hard shape, convinced that I can experience stubbing my toe as a pure sensation, not good or bad. Expecting the best means I will transcend pain, free from suffering at last.

I continue with my left foot. Then my right again. I am stubborn and willful and my inner drill sergeant is in full form. I think I can, I think I can. 

Thirty minutes later, my toes are bleeding. I wanted to know if I could short-circuit my brain’s response—that the intense throbbing in my toes doesn’t mean I’m in danger. I wanted to be able to feel the hot pulse inside my nerves as simply life having a dance party in my feet. I wanted the inevitable pain of life to be under my control.

But I couldn’t do it.

My experiment findings? Being in a body hurts.

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Not long after my toe-stubbing experiment I begin noticing a deep, bruised sensation just below my knee caps. My heart is also bruised in a way I have never felt before when my best friend Jenny, after six inseparable years, relocates with her family to Tennessee. The ache pierces me and my denial of her impending exit succeeds only until the day her family’s moving van drives away. The morning of their departure, I bike the 2.5 mile distance between our homes through a late summer grey drizzle. I am convinced the entire ride that when I arrive at her house, we’ll skip into the kitchen, steal two Hostess Ho Ho’s (unrolling them to eat the cream first) and then wiggle our eager minds and bodies into late summer play until we collapse. Instead, I arrive to an empty house. Jenny stands at the door, her eyes bloodshot and tired. We hug, I’m sure of it. But I don’t remember anything until the large moving truck disappears, the family car trailing behind with Jenny’s face craning to look out the back window.

I bike home and bury my head in mom’s lap and cry so hard I think my brain will implode under the pressure in my head. The ache comes from my toes, travels through my guts and out my eyes. Pain is no longer a subject under the lens of my microscope. Pain suddenly is very real. I hear its jagged edges escape from my throat and I float outside myself to a safer place. Years later, I will remember this moment, watching myself from above as if I am a stranger—a girl curled in fetal position on her mom’s lap. I see how the volume of her sadness is equal to and inseparable from the love she feels for her friend. By allowing the sadness to flood her, she scribes her best friend’s name—JENNY— in permanent marker on her heart, never to be forgotten.

Jenny and I napping on a long drive up north—likely after a rousing game of “Who can sniff the down feather up their nose the fastest.” 

The bruising in my knees eventually begins to swell. I develop large, unsightly bumps below my knee caps that feel like they are being smashed by hammers with the slightest pull of gravity. Osgood Schlatters is what the doctor calls it but there’s nothing “Os-good” about it. It often happens to adolescents who are very active—the repetitive traction of muscle on tendon inflaming the growth plate under the knee. At the time of diagnosis, I am a leaping, jumping, running, swimming, hand-standing, pirouetting ribbon of flesh and it all must to come to a screeching halt until the rapid growth spurt stops.

I spend time remediating on the hard bench at the front of the ballet studio—me and a handful of distracted stage moms. My envy grows in proportion to the height of my classmates’ graceful extensions. I imagine that when I get back to the ballet barre, I too, will have become more graceful and strong. I long for the deceptive ease that flows from a dancer’s body and the battle of muscle and ligament just below the surface is just as compelling.

Six months later, the pain diminishes. Pliés are fine, grande pliés still feel like someone stuffed smooth rocks below my knee caps. Maybe Jenny put them there because I can’t separate the pain in my knees from the pain of missing her. But the pursuit of muscular precision to the soundtrack of Chopin and Tchaikovsky eventually buries those rocks. I become obsessed with the world of ballet. Nothing is ever good enough and this gives me a reason to keep pushing. The reward is the hunt. Dad is my resident masseuse, working the unnatural poses out of my muscles with his strong hands and the occasional found tool when his fingers grow weary —a kitchen fork, a rock from the lake, a racquetball — talismans of every day that bury my pain so deeply in my cells that I eventually forget it exists.

Tie-dye, braces and my first of pair of pointe shoes

I’m not made for ballet. At least physically. I outgrow everyone in my class—my long arms, legs and feet never gain the control that Balanchine dancer Gelsey Kirkland flawlessly executes in my favorite documentary Dancing with Mr. B. My rib cage is too big, my shoulders too wide. My Russian ballet trained instructor, Jaunita Makaroff (to whom we revere and fear) makes no adjustments for physical attributes that reject her standards. “Ribs in Kim! Shoulders down!” But what I don’t have structurally I make up for mentally. I crave the discipline that ballet provides. It channels all my tendencies for obsessive compulsiveness. 

Throughout childhood and adolescence I trade one repetitive behavior for another — squeezing my shoulders up and down, stretching my mouth wide, split-end hunting, repeating words over and over again, skin-picking—all a form of relieving anxiety born from my tendency to “get small” and freeze when my needs aren’t being met. Big brother Eric clobbers out our parent’s martial stress on me and I learn early on that yelling doesn’t end in rescue. His teenage friends work out their sexual curiosities on me and I learn it’s better to disappear while their groins insist my leg is a scratching post. The only time I use my voice is when I’m not pinned down, when I’m not rendered physically helpless. When the babysitter—wrapped in a white bath towel after a dip on the hot tub—gets an erection and asks me to sit on his lap, I calmly tell him “No” and go back to playing with my dolls as if he’s offered me a PB&J. The next day while mom showers, I casually recount the details through a steamy, glass door. Irate and still dripping wet, she marches next door to confront his mother. I don’t think much of this event. The image of the white tent between my sitter’s legs files itself into my brain’s “That Was Funny” album because in this particular situation, I had a choice and I said “No.”

The anxious, repetitive tics however are reviewing other albums—the ones I’ve hidden even from myself. My body responds because it knows what it needs even if my mind has forgotten. My throat yells and my needs become known every time I silently stretch my mouth. My arms shove boys’ bodies away every time I squeeze my shoulders. I extract a thimbleful of longing every time I pop a pimple. These behaviors soothe but also control me and the family jokes about Kimmy’s weird tics. Ballet channels this tendency. Obsessing over perfect extensions, perfect turn-out, perfect arches, perfect fouteés keeps me from surfacing that which I’d sooner destroyed.

But ballet is more than an outlet for my anxious wiring. The dance studio becomes my church. The dancers, my congregation. I feel whole when I’m with my ballet friends as we train, rehearse and perform. Our bond is born from sticky sweat, bloody toes, smelly ballet bags and thousands of hours devoting our lives to dance. I call us friends but we are more than this. We are sisters. We live for the ideal that each day we will be a bit better than the last. Our bodies hurt all the time and our hearts transform the hurt into joy.

NEXT CHAPTER

The beginning of fifteen years of sweat, obsession and friendship. The two girls in pink—my lifelong friend Tanya and I—shared the ballet barre from age 6 through our years together at Colorado College.