A Glorious Freedom: A Story "Slam"

If you’d like to read the story I read at the fab Wham! Bam! Thank you! Slam!, the full piece is below. I know I already sent a link to the full story slam, but I thought I’d share just the written (and video) versions of my story. I hope to do this again and encourage you to participate if you’re a writer!

This is pure heaven, I think to myself. We are naked, on a rooftop, staring up at the blackest, most star-studded, expansive sky I have ever seen in my life.

It is the very first night of our one-month trip through Mexico. A month of glorious freedom.

I am practically frothing at the mouth for release, ready to disconnect from what can feel like a prison of productivity back home.

Even my efforts to organize a menopause coven to fight the powers that be can feel like another activity on my to-do list.

We are in Baja, Mexico, at a friend’s off-grid home where the Sierra de Guadalupe mountains meet the blue-green awe that is the Sea of Cortez.

It’s a spot with no name. And no electricity either.

There is a freedom to this place that is both concrete and existential.

And then it happens.

On my way to our bedroom that first night, I slip and slam my right heel into the edge of a wood-slatted platform. I hop to the bed with the adrenaline surge of a marathoner crossing the finish line. My body is shaking, and my foot is dangling like the strands of this holiday. I intuitively know my Achilles tendon is torn.

I can’t walk. Over the days and weeks ahead, we have an impossible time finding crutches; I visit multiple doctors where we try and stitch together our broken Spanish with their slightly better English; I have surgery in La Paz, and spend a lot of time in a wheelchair, being pushed by my resilient boyfriend through the streets of Oaxaca.

I can’t make food for myself or shower without help.

I have shooting pain in my “good leg” from the contorted positions I am in day and night.

I lie on the couch in this little house, watching the two cats who live here scramble up the avocado trees and then lazily lounge on the tiled patios that make up the courtyard of this place, and I marvel at their eight working legs.

Still, I cry. I sob. I am on fire with anger. I throw things at the wall because I feel imprisoned by my own body. Again. I am two and a half years into recovery from a severe eating disorder, and this feels like a cruel joke.

Three years ago, another first night in another city in Mexico, I am on the bathroom floor. I am deep in denial about my illness: anorexia. I faint that night, I hit my head, and I get a concussion. It is the incident that convinces me I need help.

This battle with my body feels never-ending. But here’s the thing about crises like these. They practically force you to disembark from the hurtling train of productivity and endless self-improvement our toxic system wants us to ride until the end of days.

So as one version of my freedom falls away, I get curious about the idea of surrender.

To simply and yet not so easily, just…take care of myself first and foremost.

I consider what it might look like to untie this brutal corset of expectation once and for all that’s placed upon women at every turn: that no matter what befalls us, we must be superheroes in spandex, saving everyone in our path who needs help, be the bearers of everyone’s emotional weight, keep our bodies as small as our egos, and do all of this within a system that at best disdains us.

Back home, in my Robocop boot that has replaced my cast, I listen to the leaves on the Japanese maple tree in my backyard shake in the wind. I stare out the window at nothing and remember what boredom feels like.

Friends and family bring platters of lamb chops and bowls of pasta salad. They sit in our living room and ask me: How long will you be in the boot? And: when will you be able to walk again? And: when can you start driving?

I can’t answer these questions with the specificity they seem to be searching for. I don’t know exactly. This injury requires months to years of recovery. What if I can find a “glorious freedom” in not knowing?

What if I let myself be, no matter how scary or unknowable that feels?

I tell myself I will not dissolve, like the putrid powdered collagen peptide I drink in water every day to strengthen my tendon, when I feel afraid or alone in my recovery. I repeat to myself, like a mantra or the excited morning crow caws, I can crawl on my hands and knees, or crutch, through a minefield of my fears and survive. I do not need to bear the weight of the world on my shoulders. In healing from this injury and my eating disorder, I find a new kind of freedom.