Not quite utopia 🪴
Trying a little tenderness (and disassociation).
Three days before my 37th birthday, I wake up at dawn not to the light rain or delightful birdsong, but to the sound of my own ruminating thoughts. My right hand is throbbing again.
I’ve had this thumb and wrist pain for three months now, a diagnosis of De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, which was provided by Dr. Google and later confirmed by an orthopedist whose office required a $375 payment prior to my 15-minute appointment in which the doctor said he “didn’t think it was too bad,” because he has patients coming in who are screaming when he does the Finkelstein test on them. And, you see, I was not screaming.1
It’s unclear when I hurt myself. It’s possible I flung the ball to Maddie with the Chuck-It, bending back my thumb in such a way that it injured the tiny, critical tendon which happens to be one that I use all day long to do anything from open a door handle or pull up my pants to drag a window across my computer screen. Now, this tendon is trying its darnedest to heal despite me trying to move on from the whole thing because seriously, it’s just a tiny tendon. After over a month of carefully following the doctor’s orders to brace and rest it, it felt like maybe things were turning a corner. But we are here in Costa Rica now, and I let my guard down for a day, scrambling on slick rocks to feel the cool spray of La Fortuna waterfall on my skin. But also, maybe I just carried my laptop across the room in my right hand. This particular injury is not too forgiving.
So, I’m here in my head, which is the same thing as being in my body, where it’s loud enough to drown out the howler monkeys off in the jungle. I try to convince myself it will get better again if I’m more careful and to be patient with this slow, stubborn healing. This month, I deadlifted over 130% of my body weight, a new PR. I climbed a 4,000 foot mountain last month. Yet, I can’t do a downward facing dog or open a jar of tomato sauce without the pain flaring up again.
In a somatics/parts work class I’ve been taking, our instructor Em tells us about how disassociation can be as effective of a coping strategy as embodiment. We often think of disassociation as a dysfunctional trauma response beyond someone’s control, but, they teach us, it can also be a wise, supportive and therapeutic technique.
In hindsight, as a yoga instructor I’ve valued and emphasized far more frequently over the years the power of tuning into sensation in the body — to “listening to the body” — and to awareness of internal thoughts.
Now, I’m learning that being able to do the opposite is also crucial. Developing a keen awareness of my body’s sensations, particularly the uncomfortable or painful ones, is helpful only to a certain extent. After that, it becomes obsessive and leads to the creation of further narratives and storytelling about the sensation itself. For me, a dull ache is a slippery slope to “Why am I so careless?” which is a slippery slope to “I’m never going to feel better” and eventually to “I’ll never be able to do the things I love again.”
Perhaps you have heard the story from the Buddhist parable about the second dart (or arrow) of suffering. In the story, the first dart is when we encounter some natural human, animal experience of suffering — like we are injured or lose someone we love or life comes at us. We can’t control or prevent the first dart and it’s natural and often necessary to be upset by it. The second dart, however, is the the self-inflicted dart that we launch at ourselves when we blame or shame ourselves with some story about the first dart.
Over the years, Ben and I have taken to gently calling each other out about the second dart. We are allowed to grieve and vent about an illness or a pain, but when we are starting to fabricate the coulda/woulda/shoulda’s, we try to check in and ask each other: “Is this the first dart, or the second?”
That doesn’t mean I don’t still launch them at myself constantly.
After some time has passed as I try to disassociate through my phone2, Ben wakes up.
“Should I go try and find some birds?” he asks. (It’s a rhetorical question. He’s found about a hundred new birds since getting here and of course he’s going to go find more.)
“Well, they’re certainly not going to find themselves.”
My response is a reference to a novella we’ve both recently read and that I’ve now embraced as my whole personality and won’t shut up about. It’s called A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers and it tells the story of a tea monk named Dex and a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap who meet in the forest to teach one another (and all of us, as readers) some important lessons.
One of the most powerful reminders that I take away from this charming book is the notion that we as humans are just animals, and yet so often we suffer in our tremendous longing to fulfill what we may call "our purpose.”
In the story, Dex’s job is to sit with folks who are struggling, to pour them a cup of tea, and to listen to their struggles. Dex is a monk of the god of small comforts, and the people who come to him exist in a world where basic needs are met abundantly. His visitors, therefore, are not always struggling with first dart problems, they’re often struggling with second dart problems.
Animals, on the other hand — whether they be birds, bats, bears, or bullet ants — are ego-less and strive for no purpose in life. (You will also never find animals other than humans suffering from the pain of the second dart.) As humans, we long to find ourselves, to make meaning of our experiences. So often we long to justify our existence through the legacy we leave or the mark that we make.
But what if striving for our purpose is just a way for us to cling to the illusion of our permanence? We often resist the potential truth that we are merely (and wonderfully and beautifully!) atomic dust in the wind on the slow, eventual journey to reconstructing future life. Capitalism as a construct begs us to cling to this illusion, this false bill of goods, that we can own or create or do a thing that will make us immortal – that our legacy can live on after we are gone.
But there is something actually a bit freeing about pondering that our goodness is not contingent on the fulfillment of our purpose. Mosscap offers an alternative invitation: believe yourself to be good simply because you are here and you exist.3
Yet this is so incredibly hard!! If it were easy, we would not have many of the socio-political issues that we have today as a species. And this is why I find the story such genius, because in this striving-toward-utopia place that the author has created, it’s recognized that people will lose their strength if not able to rest in “small comforts” — to find ways to be tender with their animal-like selves.
A cup of tea can be used to disassociate, too.
Down at La Fortuna waterfall, swarms of people trod 500 feet down a staircase made by humans fitter and braver than us to gather in the cool water deposited from La Fortuna river.
We all want to take pictures of the magnificent waterfall, but not of our fellow humans. We want to capture just the right image: one that we can own, one that we can share with others to grow our own social capital. If some keel-billed Toucan were to soar through the frame in the background, we’d count ourselves fortunate — we might even be able to profit a bit more from such a treat of an image!
But if a human were to burst into the frame, disturbing the pristine waterfall image, we would grumble-sigh in the sentiment of that bumper sticker I once saw that read, “Too Many People / Not Enough Nature.”
When I look at this picture now though, I can’t help but chuckle.
There we all are, homo sapiens who evolved from apes, disassociating to the beauty of our surroundings as we enjoy the steady thrum of water crashing from a waterfall that is so strong no one can swim into it. It is so perfectly animal of us to have gathered here to climb and to soak and to marvel. It is our nature.
Out of frame, crowds form; secluded beauty captured. (We are water, too.)
An Exercise: What Are You Built For?
As a warm-up for writing this essay, I free-wrote on the question of what my body is built for. As an offering, I’d invite you to write on this question, too. Feel free to share anything that comes up in the comments or via email with me.
Built Built to wake Built to shake off Built to bear down Built to bring new life Built to brrrr when it's cold Built to shhheesh when it's hot Built of the stuff that once built home Built to buckle when it's hard Built to soften when it’s safe Built to be with each other Built to be in the light Built to break down Built to wither Built to rest
At least not until later when I would find out from my insurance’s EOB that said office overcharged me by 70% and now isn’t returning my calls to refund the difference. Three cheers for the American health care system!
As it turns out, I’ve long known a pretty great tool for disassociating: it’s called social media!
"Built to brrrr when it's cold
Built to shhheesh when it's hot"
This made me laugh out loud. Also I LOVED those books. The absolute best.
What a treat to read, Kelly! Going to check out the book.