Two months ago today I broke my right ankle. I’ve always had the notion that when relatively healthy young people break their ankles they are probably doing something enviably cool in the backcountry, or at least meaningfully testing their physical limits. In my case, I slipped down a mild grassy incline at a small outdoor concert in Petaluma. I was there fresh from a weekend off-grid, happy to be kicking back and kicking off the start of a summer of meaningful work and travel.
On the exam table, the doctors told me this is just how it goes sometimes, a taste test of the tenuous inevitable in a human life. In the moments before my ankle break, I sauntered barefoot, bright, and loose down the hill in the warm evening air of high summer. I wore a blue cotton dress and my grandmother’s heavy silver jewelry with the turquoise. My ceremony jewelry. I felt beautiful. When my ankle snapped, when I doubled over in pain as the vasovagal response mounted, sound draining from my ears and sweat pouring from my temple, I felt the exquisite agony of catching a curveball I didn’t know I’d been readying for. My bones sprang open, fractured at the root, reliable right foot forward no longer an option.
A visit to the emergency room and then the podiatrist department made it clear that my fall had fractured and severely displaced my fibula. Surgery was required for the bone to have any chance of healing in the correct place. After nearly two months non-weight-bearing in a splint and cast, I am now in a walking boot and able to start hobbling about. This means I can now stand upright, get my leg wet, and am at last able to carry a hot beverage from one room to another.
The two months since the initial break have been a consolidated study of all the things I already love: the mind, the body, the self, family systems, social systems, human behavior, and a handful of other idiosyncratic topics that sprout up unexpectedly, as they do. Below is a collection of some lessons learned in the last two months. After I wrote this list, I googled “lessons from a broken ankle” and encountered a few reflection pieces and Reddit threads, mainly housing the conventional wisdom of “slow down,” “lean into patience,” and “rest is key,” all things that are absolutely true but a complete snooze-fest to read when not well written. I am taking it for granted that you, dear reader, can assume that I have learned a lot about slowing down, patience, and rest. Here are my additional takes:
There is no such thing as life lived elsewhere. Sure, the mind might construct alternate and wonderful possibilities of something better that is not this here and now, but those are not true. There are few better opportunities for watching all of the fanciful delusions of mind than the early days of unexpectedly being laid up in bed, in the liminal time when you know all your plans and dreams for the next months are at standstill, but you’ve not yet fully surrendered to this reality. My mind expertly crafted visions of the friends I’d meet on the dance floor at the music fest, or the spiritual ecstasy I was going to cultivate on an Alaskan mountaintop, or the creative partners I was going to meet at fill in the blank event. Once my mind exhausted itself of this function, it could settle down to experience my life as it was, and encounter ecstasy as it exists in the quiet spaces.
Having a physical difference from the mainstream elicits other people to feel entitled to your story. I have moved through this nation/the majority of spaces I inhabit as a petite and inconspicuous white woman with nothing particularly “notable” about me for people to interrogate. All of a sudden, people felt like they had the right to ask me about what happened without asking me my name. I didn’t really personally mind this, because I low-key love when people are inappropriate and baffling. I also figured it would last only as long as my injury was visible. But, I imagine that if I had a chronic condition, or a history of being marginalized and questioned about my body and/or identity throughout my life, this would be both painful and maddening. Studying the misattuned ways in which many strangers out in public put demands on my personal time and space by questioning what was going on with me was illuminating. It gave me more insight into loved ones who experience this regularly. Going forward in my life, I plan to be all the more mindful about leading with presence and curiosity about who people are this very moment, not about what happened to them or their backstory until I feel this is clearly invited.
People want to help, but it’s up to me to tell them how. Many people will offer vague gestures at support, of the recognizable variety of “Let me know if there’s anything I can do!” I have said this exact sentence many times to people who are injured or just had a baby, and then I do nothing to follow up. Having an injury that doesn’t allow me to drive, much less function alone, has been a good teacher in asking people to actually do things. I plan to carry this practice forward given that I am in a season of recognizing all the help I do need in my life that is not just limited to having an injury. I also plan to make my vague gestures towards helping others less vague.
Sometimes people will, in fact, offer specific ways of helping, that usually have to do with what they themselves value and love. One friend offered to bathe me, another offered to play me the stand-up bass, another wheeled me a quarter mile down the surf in a beach wheelchair, another came to hardcore chill for a few days and we ended up surprising ourselves with the drama and intrigue of the board game checkers, and others offered to come sing to me. Taking people up on giving what they legitimately want to give makes everyone feel great and is, I think, the cornerstone of happy and healthy reciprocity. We all want to feel purposeful in what we have to offer. These experiences are some of my favorite memories from the past two months.
Receiving help is a skill. It should be studied, practiced, and practiced again. The most gracious and well people I know are the ones who receive help gracefully, without shame of being a burden, or a sense of needing to make it up to others. These same people also tend to be very good at giving help, too.
Even bathrooms in spaces that you would think would be designed for people with mobility issues are abhorrently inaccessible. Literally the bathroom in the Kaiser podiatry surgery department does not have a push button to make the door open, and you have got to bet that a large percentage of people using that bathroom are not walking in on two feet. What the hell.
Having an injury is an especially great time to watch mental projections. At the farmers market I saw a group of people I know from afar, and I found myself instantaneously in a resentful reaction that they weren’t coming up to me to offer me care and condolences. A split second after this arose, I caught it and questioned myself: Hannah, did you tell these people you got injured? Why are you assuming that they are tracking everything at the farmers market right now, including you? What’s the deal with wanting the pity? This is just one small example of things my mind has done throughout this more vulnerable time, using neurotic tendencies to try to exert control and the illusion of an aggrieved and therefore righteously superior self. I.e., insanity. Catching our own insanity will usually reveal all of the things we are doing that recapitulate separation and therefore violence, even if the action seems benign on the surface. The faster we catch these thoughts, the more able we are to see through them as they arise. Being in a state different than our “default” is a holy opportunity to take the inevitable content that will arise and to be more interested in the process by which it occurs than by the content itself. Then, we have the rest of our lives to keep kindly practicing this same skill all of the time.
Sex really is the undercurrent to a lot of life. I know that psychosexual urges form the bedrock of so much of human relating but, for better or for worse, it’s just not the primary dynamic I track. But all of a sudden, being in a body that did not feel hegemonically sexual in an ableist culture, I saw the sex stuff everywhere. I recall being asked by a classmate in high school named Nathan, who smoked a ton of weed and who had a tortoise named Green, why I always wore such low-cut shirts. I was embarrassed at the time, but I’ve thought about this for many years and have examined the ways in which seduction has, often subconsciously to me, played a part in how I move through the world. I also once read something about Enneagram 2s and how they will often dress in revealing clothes without even realizing, which seems strange but I also know it’s true because I’ve lived it. The point is, playing the game of wielding sexual power feels, interestingly, less threatening to the ego when it is unexamined and unconscious. Being in a cast, using mobility devices, and carrying extra bodyweight from such a lifestyle change made me more acutely aware of how much I no longer felt like a sexual object out in the world, and how much of that lack of sexuality was in many ways a projection of mind, an internalization of standards from the cultures I operate in re who gets to be and feel sexy. This felt affronting, and rife territory to further unhook my own mind. Lots to work with here. It has led me to think about hotness as a state of energetic resonance and radiance. It has also grown my respect and curiosity for the ways that identities and bodies that exist beyond mainstream beauty standards have engaged and inquired into eroticism in ways I still will not presume to understand but which are obviously cornerstones to collective liberation.
Life has a way of serving you the thing you don’t even know you need. After nearly 28 years, my parents are moving out of my childhood home, and I am sad. Because I broke my ankle, and because I needed a ton of help, I lived with them for a month. During this time, we found the camcorder home video footage I’ve been asking to see for 20 years. A friend digitized it, and I spent many hours sitting between my parents watching my early years of life and their early years of parenthood. I am exactly their age now as when they had me. Nestled between the two of them, I watched them cheer me on as I took my first steps and learned to walk. In these videos, they urge me to clap for myself when I take a step, when I climb up on top of the futon, when I poop. While I would not have asked to spend a month in my childhood home, largely bedridden at the age of 32, this era was a remarkable time of healing and study of my own/my family’s becoming. The support and love of my parents live deep in my bones, but seeing their quality of presence, celebration, and delight offered a whole new layer of reverence for them/the effort it takes to raise another human. I sent clips of these videos to many friends and received responses that watching these videos was deeply touching and educational.
People can change, but also people are fundamentally who they are. In watching my young parents on video, I saw the exact essence of who I know them to be now. I saw the same in watching my baby self. To my amazement and amusement, I also saw many of the familiar facial patterns, stimming behaviors, and totally odd physical tics and tendencies my friends have been poking fun at me for my entire life. I feel more affirmed than ever that there is some unmistakable, unshakeable seed of mystery in each of us that is the original blueprint encoded far back beyond the womb. This affirmation aids me in surrendering deeper into the design of whatever is going on here on this planet.
Return to being literal children in moments of vulnerability is very real. One night, my parents went out to a meeting and they told me they’d be back at 6:30. At 6:45, they still were not back. 6:47 and they weren’t back. My body began to go into a whole fight or flight response. 6:48 pm and all of a sudden my heart rate was skyrocketing and I was convinced that my parents had died in a car crash and I was going to be stuck alone at home but also that a fire would come and I would have no way of getting out alive. My parents came home a few minutes later and found me in tears. They gave me a black-and-white cookie they’d brought home for me wrapped in a napkin and everything worked out okay. In addition to their hugs and nonjudgmental witnessing, the cookie really helped. Cookies are very important healing forces. On the other side of this coin, I also found myself inhabiting the mind-state of a child in a number of very positive ways. I got to literally and metaphorically hang out on the passenger side of the car during experiences at which no-one expected my participation or aid. I loved this. Once I exhausted my fighting with the reality of my ankle break, I spent a lot of time in a state of expanded, passive awareness, in which I just kind of surrendered to the flow of whatever happened next. I was still able to maintain this, even as I did work and other tasks that needed my own exertion. In fact, I think this is the most important lesson of this entire experience and essay.
Prayer is really up to something. It sets many things in motion that I do not yet even understand, but I do understand something is happening. I am grateful for the profound generosity of the lineages and teachers I have been fortunate to learn from and heal in. I strongly sense that many of the events of my recent life, this injury central among them, are the direct result of learning to pray, and my conception of how the universe works is rapidly expanding in new ways.
CBT Therapy might actually be kind of okay. By virtue of hitting my out of pocket maximum, I am now seeing a therapist online via a third-party contractor with Kaiser. The work is a far cry from the psycho-surgeons of the shadow I have opted for as my practitioners, but also, it’s kind of cool. I’m kind of like oh yea just talking to this nice lady and discussing my thoughts is kind of interesting. More than anything, I am reminded how helpful it is to have a broad holding field and team for different components of inner work and different lines of development. In any domain, having a team of support improves the situation.
In general, the process of spiritual awakening and egoic deconstruction, for most people (myself included), is a mysterious unfolding, a sly and subtle shedding over months and years, where it’s hard to pinprick a single moment of rapid alteration. And then, there are some moments where the ego experiences something that to me feels energetically akin to thick slabs of velcro rending themselves apart. Many of my identities wrapped up in my “doer” and how I present in the world underwent such a tearing that has left me feeling fundamentally altered and I’m still watching it settle. Accepting limitations is actually a big developmental edge that can mirror to us honestly who we are and where we are in the journey.
Injury offers a great opportunity to examine use of all muscle groups, including how the tongue uses language. In my normal life on two feet, if I want something in the immediate environment I will typically just go get it. In my injured state, I learned to be very precise in saying what I wanted and needed. This is a big deal for someone who has historically been thrown into a fugue state in response to the question “What do you need?” All of a sudden, I was throwing out the word “need” all over the place. I need the blue water bottle that is sitting outside to the left of the chair with the three pillows in it. I need my transparent cast protector which is hanging on the third rung of the towel rack in the living room bathroom. I need you to just sit with me and let me be sad. I experienced in new ways how accessing and articulating the physical needs scaffolds to accessing and articulating the subtler needs, and that doing so helps heal some very early developmental territory.
While many people have the energetic sensibilities of bull in a china shop, many people do not. These two categories do often overlap, and we all must admit that we are both at different times. Many people want to help. During this time, I’ve experienced people going out of their way to open doors for me or to hand me things, more often than not without asking me what happened. I attended a workshop in honor of the anniversary of Joanna Macy’s death, and while everyone was dancing and I swayed by myself on the sidelines, an older woman came and took my hand and swayed with me outside of the main circle. I found out later that she is my neighbor a few doors down, and then I went over to her house for dinner with her and her partner. She gave me a toaster. The other night we encountered each other as I hobbled down the street. We hugged. She was wearing a bright purple cutoff hoodie. These details are the spice of life.
Electric shopping carts are highly effective and also fun. I only used one once, but I had a great time. It was speedy and felt surprisingly slick to ride despite its girth. Earlier that week I’d watched some episodes of the excellent Australian show “You Can’t Ask That” and, of the many episodes I watched, one of my favorite parts from the wheelchair users was them noting how stupid and infantilizing it is when people tell them “You’re an inspiration.” “Tell me I’m an inspiration because I got my PhD, not because I’m in a wheelchair,” one man bemoans. While using the electric shopping cart, a woman in the spice aisle told me I was brave, which was weird and made me think of the PhD, but actually felt not untrue given the tightness of the aisles and the crowdedness of the market.
Rapid industrial growth alongside wealth inequality exerts itself into all facets of society. Okay, hardly news. But, a few weeks into my injury I watched a documentary about the Gilded Age, which is the period of American history roughly spanning the late 1870s to the early 1900s, in which mega-rich robber barons increasingly ruled the day, and I was just like damn: the seeds of social stratification really beanstalked during that time. Mega-rich robber barons do still rule the day. While not specific to my ankle, life is endless opportunity to more closely study the threads of capitalistic consolidation that have proliferated in this nation, especially informing who gets access to health care, and everything else about the ability of the common person to live a healthy, safe life.
Our healthcare system is bonkers. Also not news, but my Kaiser ER bill came back valuing the 5 minutes I spent with the doctor who looked at my x-rays and told me I needed to go to a podiatrist as being worth over $4,000. Now that I’ve had closer proximity to the absurdity of this system I increasingly feel how central this question plays in the political realm and it is worthy of all the air time it gets.
“Disabled” is a minority group that anyone can find themselves in the blink of an eye. In my case the injury is short term and the healing trajectory is linear, so I at no point have qualified myself as disabled, but it could have been much more severe. There is always the chance for it to be much more severe. I imagine the immediacy of the realization will fade, but I’d like to hope I no longer walk through the world so naive as to not think that I could depart from having a fully able body at any moment.
Having an acute injury is a great practice for aging and dying. My friend Emily gave me an “I <3 Aging & Dying” bumper sticker a few years ago, and I only mustered up the gusto to put it on my car about 6 months ago. When my cast came off I saw a weak, shriveled, crusty, Frankensteinish leg. I hope I make it to an age where I am old and frail and sung out of this life by loved ones, at which time my leg will probably look pretty similar. It is already a large part of my practice to frequently reflect on the fact of my own impending death and that of everyone I love, and that each day moves us closer to this truth. My ankle injury has helped bring a more immediate and embodied component to this practice.
Humans are wildly adaptable. When I first broke my ankle I was so sad and it was hard to let go of the numerous physically demanding experiences I had planned for the summer. At the end of the month, preparing to move out of my parents’ house, I mourned that this time of cocooning with them was coming to a close. I just learned the Japanese term “Nagori” to describe the sensation of sweet and sad nostalgia in savoring an experience you know to be ending, and feel that sums it up pretty well.
Crying both feels good and is efficient to healing physically, spiritually, and emotionally. My friends call me a “genius at crying,” so I may be particularly biased here, but I feel like I was able to process everything going on with great efficiency because my tears helped me move the energy. I had a lot of support to attend a grief ceremony 6 weeks after my injury, and I let myself be “that person” who just full-on wails into the space. The thing that was cool about this was that, as I was full-on wailing, I had no particular stories about why I was crying, or content I was consciously aware of mourning, nor did I indulge in any self-consciousness about the fact that I was crying at full volume in a group of 20 people. I just fully released into crying and it felt great. I feel it has helped to heal my ankle.
AI has made its way into doctor communications. I imagine this has been the case for a while but it is news to me. I believe my doctor is using AI to respond to my (quippy and fun, if I say so myself) messages in my Kaiser client portal, and what gave it away was his reply, “Great to see you today, too!” in response to my message I’d sent a few days earlier, followed by exacting recapitulations of each of my questions. I do not actually bemoan him for this, because he is an exceptional man, has wonderful bedside presence, and has dedicated his life to the precise and careful art of surgically healing people’s bones, for which I give him ultimate props. I get it — doctors have higher priority items to do than respond to every client request, and I actually got all the info I needed from the AI response. But still, I feel bummed. The system the aforementioned robber barons created values factory-like efficiency, and AI in our personal communications is just the next step in removing my chance to poetically correspond with my surgeon in the way I dream.
Nurses and hospital people are angels. I was so, so well cared for in the 5 hours I spent in the pre-op room prior to my surgery. I interacted with many health care professionals of many ages, races, and vibes. Everyone was respectful and attentive, but also themselves! They were so human. I deeply felt their heart and their humor. Once in the operating room, the last thing I remember saying before the anesthesia hit was “Wow, pirates had to drink rum and bite a cloth, and I get to have you guys!” The people that work boots on the ground in our medical system are heroes and should be exalted as such, especially the nurses.
Pooping is the lynchpin of health. For 5 days after my surgery I did not poop due to the ways anesthesia and pain meds slow down peristalsis, and it was awful. I think it is important to normalize talking about our digestion and checking in on this for each other and admitting that we are animal bodies deeply influenced by what our bodies are up to. Nurse angels have to deal with a lot of poop and they are heroes.
Human beings thrive together through care. There is unverified and questionable lore around the anthropologist Margaret Mead referencing a healed femur bone of an ancient skeleton as evidence of “civilization” amongst ancient ancestors, noting the personal sacrifice to keep an injured person alive. Other paleoanthropology supports this, though that feels somewhat irrelevant. This feels pretty intuitive to me. Plus, any culture with any wisdom teaches about collaboration and mutuality. Also, it makes me feel nice. I sense that some of these bullet points are veering heavily towards “Wow everything is full of love,” but I do experience the world this way so I’m going to leave number 27 at that.
The body is genius. While these two months have felt slow, the reality is that I no longer have a broken bone. Now I am rehabbing a broken ankle, working to finesse the muscles and ligaments back into functionality. It’s actually astounding that our bones take years and years to grow, and such a short time to heal. The body is infinitely intelligent and when we drop out of our minds, into our soma, follow the intuition of what the body knows, and surrender to its timeline, miracles occur. I write this from the perspective of not having any chronic condition, and thus I imagine this is easier for me to say than many. However, I have heard those who deal with debilitating chronic conditions speak to the profound intelligence and creativity that their body, even under profound duress, exerts to keep them alive and functioning. It is understandably easy to focus on what we perceive is going wrong, and it is equally important to focus on what is going right.
Kaiut yoga is the way and truth and the life. I’ve been preaching this for a while. When my aforementioned wonderful surgeon took off my cast and tested my healing by asking me to resist his weight by flexing and pointing, he was surprised and pleased with my ankle strength. I attribute this to the hundreds of hours of my life I have spent doing ankle work in Kaiut yoga. If you want to heal your nervous system and experience the viability of your body as you age and encounter the present moment as it is, may I suggest Kaiut yoga. I’ve been practicing for many years so this is not one of those “I just became a vegetarian” type proselytizations. Many people I know who have dealt with chronic injury their whole lives have shared that Kaiut is the only thing that really started to move the dial.
YouTube is a legitimately useful app and connection point to the world and learning. I am grateful for its role in my life. Prior to the injury I deleted YouTube off my phone, but then I re-instated it while at my parents’ house, primarily so I could once again engage in one of my main spiritual practices of the last 10+ years: listening to Adyashanti dharma talks in bed. This bullet point could actually maybe just be titled “Consider signing up for Adya’s channel membership,” but I will also give a shout-out to the YouTube shorts that feature guy that Kareem who asks people for their takes on the subway and to the lead actors of Heated Rivalry for having good fashion and pulling hot shenanigans.
Life is infinitely better with many supports. I have many, most of which I was born into with the luck of the draw. I have thought numerous times throughout this experience about the profound privileges of my life (living in community, family nearby to care for me, ability to work online, the list goes on) and how rivetingly difficult this experience would be if I was in any number of other circumstances (an uninsured person, a parent, someone whose presence and labor is required in person, isolated, etc.). Difficulty exists on a profound scale, and I recognize that my difficulty is real but minuscule in comparison to many who sustain this injury and far worse traumas. My regard and reverence for what people live through is big. It is astounding what people live through. If you are reading this, I am sure you have lived through some astounding things. Bless your life.
The world is really, really, REALLY fucking magical. Horrors are abundant, but so are bushtits in the dappled light of golden hour, and the scent of eucalyptus on a warm breeze, and late summer wildflowers. I realize I’ve written very little in this post about the deepest love affair of my life, the natural world, which is perhaps because I just deeply take it for granted that earth is mother and healer supreme. The first time my parents wheeled me down the street to the meadow a few hundred yards from our house, I was absolutely crying gazing up at the treetops and the clouds. It was intensely psychedelic and intensely ordinary. In this state, there is no thing too small to be grateful for. This is the true state.
Few things beat lived experience for empathy. And I say this as a therapist, who likes to think I’m pretty good at deeply empathizing with the many experiences of my clients that are divergent from my own. I hardly think we need to have first-hand experience of what others have gone through to support them, but experiencing our own shade of challenge goes a long way in plugging into the socket of where and why others hurt. There are few teachers like suffering.
Our life’s work is to love our specific and exact life. No one else will ever live or love my exact life. I was born into this life and this body with this constellation of people and beings and artifacts that represent those people and beings. I am of the beings and the place I am of. This will never be different. This is my unique and particular curriculum and set of instructions and paint brush to brandish. Whatever is happening in my life is what is happening in my life.
Gratitude is an unparalleled state of being. Thank you for my life is a very humble prayer. What is this life? How is it that we came to be here by every small miracle and still, at least in this moment, against every odd and hard thing, remain? What a wonder that other beings, however imperfectly, offered us enough of a handhold to say: Baby, I believe in you to walk.
Thank you to my many friends and mentors, and especially to my parents and to my teacher, Diana Zaheer, for tending the seeds of all these lessons for so many years.
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