Letter 92: Being Forced to Stop
When our bodies make us pay attention to life
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Happy End of April!
One of our repeat writers is here with us today—Jess Uhler—and I’m so thankful for her words because she doesn’t back down. She digs in and grapples with often-complex, layered concepts. She does this in her photography and in her Instagram images and writing, as well. I admire her strength and bravery. Her letter today makes me think of an Anne Lamott passage I’ve saved:
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
I know you’ll really enjoy Jess’ piece. Happy reading! —Molly
Click below to listen to Jess read her letter:
Around Thanksgiving of 2021, I was on my hands and knees in our bedroom in the middle of the night, howling so loudly with pain that I woke up my kids. What began in the spring- hip and low back pain I attributed to a mountain bike crash- had slowly evolved into incapacitating pain, radiating like electric currents down my leg.
For weeks, my muscles would intermittently seize up like a vice grip tightening around my pelvis. The pain was exquisite and edgy, unlike anything I have ever felt, despite having birthed four babies naturally. There was no position I could sit in or lie in that would bring relief of any kind, and no medication, including prescription narcotics, valium, Oxy, muscle relaxers, or THC, would even take the edge off.
It took several trips to the ER and a favor from a friend to finally get an MRI and a diagnosis. The disc between L4 and L5 vertebrae was bulging, being pinched, and pushing on the sciatic nerve. Surgery might be the only solution.
The background noise of the pain was fear.
I spent weeks immobilized, and while I was draped over an ottoman in the living room or crawling on the kitchen floor, thoughts of “what-if” invaded my present moment. What if I never recover? What if I can’t run or bike or swim again? What if I can’t work anymore? Or perform basic functions like grocery shopping or driving? I had already missed out on going with my family to cut down our Christmas tree because I wouldn’t be able to sit for the 20-minute drive.
On the heels of these thoughts was an overwhelming empathy for those who experience chronic pain. To be at the mercy of how you feel each moment, how your body is functioning or performing each day is a humbling experience, thrusting you into the essence of what it means to be human in the sometimes shocking reality of our frailty despite the narrative we fabricate that says otherwise.
The truth is, we are contingent beings, dependent on so much that is unseen within and without. The truth is, bodies break and things fall apart.
Even in those darkest days, I knew my body was teaching me, and I wanted to be present to listen to the pain, not let it be wasted. In talking with many others, looking for help and insight, I heard over and over again similar stories of mid-forties bodies breaking down in this way, slipped discs and nerve pain, muscle weakness, and imbalance.
What I found through my own physical therapy work and healing was this crisis was a long-time coming, a reckoning for decades of neglect. My posterior chain (read: glutes, hamstrings, lower back, and core muscles) was weak and underdeveloped. The small muscles I needed to stabilize my spine were so tired and strained they couldn’t do their job anymore. Injury exacerbated what was already there. Months of me ignoring the pain in the spring and summer allowed it to get worse and come to a climax in the fall.
Our bodies are marvelous at compensating for imbalances and weaknesses. If the correct muscles can’t do the job, we will recruit others to work harder at stabilizing and moving. Eventually, that doesn’t work anymore and pain becomes our alarm system.
The muscles I needed had atrophied when I neglected to pay attention to the small things. My path to healing involved retraining muscles on such a basic level, often practicing movements that didn’t really feel like I was doing much at all. Some very important but small muscles didn't know how to fire because I had long since stopped using them. The workouts my physical therapist assigned me were elemental. They didn’t always feel productive, but I knew I needed to trust the process. I also knew they were telling me about my life.
For a lot of my adult life, I could work harder, and push myself more in order to get through marriage, parenting, running my business, and whatever it was I was trying to accomplish. And then, mercifully, that stopped working.
I won’t say it was without pain, disorientation, and confusion. Just like the disc pain leveled me physically, in mid-life I was also brought to my knees emotionally and spiritually. In both realms, I had no choice but to stop, and surrender.
Wait. Wait. Wait.
Just like the small muscles of my back needed me to pay attention to them, mid-life presented pain that invited me to pay attention to what I had allowed to atrophy.
If we are paying attention to our lives, to our truest emotions and needs, we will eventually recognize all the ways we are compensating for areas of imbalance and weakness.
We will be faced with the pain of relationships we’ve held onto that are unhealthy, dynamics we’ve grown familiar with that are actually harming us, or our own reactions born out of woundedness and fear. We will have to face the deep reality that parts of our hearts and lives we’ve neglected need tending. We will have to re-learn the patterns of living that allow us to be whole and healthy.
It may take retraining our hearts, minds, and spirits, maybe learning for the first time how to process certain parts of our stories. It may look like a complete overhaul of our time, habits, and priorities. It will certainly be painful and often tedious to learn new ways of being, coping, reacting, or interacting.
Sometimes the things we turn to ground us—spiritual practices, physical routines, breathing exercises, therapy—might feel inadequate to help us. When I began my physical recovery, I had to learn new ways of walking and sitting, and moving. It took mindfulness and intention in areas that had been on auto-pilot my entire life.
It is hard to trust that I am really Doing Something when I show up for my prayer and meditation practice in the morning or take the time to reset my nervous system with a cold swim in the Sound, or simply take time to stare out the window, read a book, go for a walk with no destination and no phone. It takes trust to believe that the spiritual formation I desire is, to quote Nietzsche, “A long obedience in the same direction.”
There are no shortcuts, and it’s not solely my motivation that makes it happen, thankfully. My faith allows me to trust and rest in the fact that Divine Love orchestrates my life and transforms my heart. We have an untold number of tools and stories that lead us to believe we are in control of our lives, and that if only we work smarter and harder we can master our days.
This leads to an under-functioning of the aspects of character that are most essential to me: faith, hope, and love. Parker Palmer says, “We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives—we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.”
Small, stabilizing habits take time to build strength. It feels so uncomfortable to interact in new ways where deep relational ruts have carried us for so long, or to be honest about what we need. The anchors for our days and lives are sometimes small muscle work. Nothing sexy or showy, just the behind-the-scenes practices, the ways we show up, again and again, every day in the most basic of ways—the deep breath we take before responding to a child’s tantrum, the pause before reacting to a partner’s frustration, putting our phone in another room to honor our attention and time, taking vitamins and drinking enough water, resting when we need to regardless of whether it feels earned.
Just like we might engage in a yoga practice, we are practicing being human, being fully alive and fully ourselves, hands and hearts open to the story being written of our lives. Learning to let go of judgment of what I do or don’t accomplish in a day, and accepting the real limitations of my present self instead of measuring against some past or future version is a kindness that doesn’t come easily to me but is part of the steady practice I am trying to embrace.
It’s a common story that we spend our young adult lives Doing, perhaps ignoring certain muscle weaknesses along the way, just trying to get by. Eventually Doing wears us out, and we have to wake up to the call toward Being.
When I think back to the days I spent wracked with chronic pain from this bulging disc and the myriad fears that ensued, I am overwhelmed with gratitude to be where I am today: not fully recovered and restored, but not in pain most days and beginning to resume most of the activities I loved before.
Listening to my limitations, physical or otherwise, is as much of a gift of guidance as any wide-open door. How much struggle do we endure when we believe the pervasive myth that we are limitless, and can do anything we set our minds to? All we have to do is look at the cyclical and seasonal reality of the natural world to find solace in the ebb and flow, and to remember that we are not machines, but organic and spiritual beings. We are made of stardust, but we are still creatures.
Our bodies, in sickness and in health, are the one thing we carry with us our entire lives. They have much to teach us if we have ears to listen.
Jess’ Five Favorite Things:
I’ve made this cake recipe for several gatherings and it is a hit every time. I usually prefer a more complex and interesting dessert than cake- but this one is worth making!
I saw this band live a couple weeks ago and it was such an amazing show- intimate, soulful and surprisingly hilarious. Gorgeous harmonies and guitar work.
This book is a fascinating read and helped me reframe what it means not just that I have a body, but I AM a body.
This podcast: I skip the whiskey reviews because as much as I do like whiskey I don’t need to hear aficionados talk about it for 10 minutes, but the rest of the podcast always covers things I’m passionate about—faith and philosophy—exploring life’s great questions and concepts.
This book by one of my favorite authors. I am re-reading this again for the first time in decades and savoring every delicious morsel. Annie Dillard is an astonishing guide to the magic and stark realities of the natural world.
In gratitude,
Jess Uhler
P.S. Jess wrote beautiful piece on friendship in early 2022. Be sure to check it out.
As I read this, I'm on a two week medical leave specifically for the purpose of rest and healing. It's not surprising me that I've had a lot of physical and emotional responses simmering to the surface throughout. I think it's hard when it's "counter-culture" to prioritize rest for both physical and emotional purpose (usually both). I had to fight against the feeling of being selfish to take time to rest and heal. My aunt reminded me yesterday that, yes, I'm resting for me, but also for everyone else that I take care of in my regular routine. That resonated, as will your words!