Into the Broken Snow Globe
A flash autofiction description of physical pain, medical experiences, and past eating-disordered-behavior. →[content warning]←
When I first felt the searing of shin splints, I was hobble-sprinting toward a dance class in below zero weather. I was about 95 pounds of ballerina, cold, and in pain. Tears were dusting the icicle of my sharp little face. I felt very, very frustrated to be so very incapacitated by who knows what.
It began when I was born. Obviously. Or, maybe it began in utero.
Or maybe before that in the cosmos, as some sort of angelic being that decided to suffer for the sake of learning. But that’s pretty much how every single story in the history of humans begins, which you also already know.
So I was hobble-sprinting (TM) like a lonely leprechaun, at only five feet tall and with almost no physical health left in my body. I was searing, burning, and angry, but also urgently sad. My heart ached for a change — any change — to something easier. Anything, really, where I wouldn’t have to suffer every moment of every day.
At this point in time, I was more comfortable with a toothbrush down my throat for no reason at all than I was with my boyfriend, or with a nighttime spliff of weed, or with my delicate and strained shin bones and lifted tibias. I was sick of everyone, but especially sick of myself. Sickness seemed easier.
I got to ballet class 7 minutes late, which was four minutes too late to get credit for that day. I wasn’t really much of a ballerina. I was, more so, an 18 year old biology major who needed a physical education credit. It was part of the general education units that I did not want. And also a near-cliché aspect of my childhood extracurricular history.
Did the toothbrush comment feel abrupt? Part of the conundrum of being a limping dancer with medical problems galore is that I lost a great deal of my human compassion. My selfishness increased with my pain levels. So, basically, I don’t have enough energy to consider your personal history of eating disorders or not. I should. But at least I’m aware (and telling you directly) that I don’t.
I danced while crying. Small, small tears until later, after class, at which point I began to silently sob. I hid into the crevice of a wall within a behemoth chrome arts building. The facility felt much more elegant than my emotions.
That large metal architecture held all of our emotions. The other dancers were not unlike me. Different injuries, different salt levels in their tears, different mothers on the phone with varying levels of narcissism or kindness (rarely both).
The dancers all had different boyfriends or fuck buddies, or girlfriends, or lovers, or friends. Or crushes on professors. Or obsessions with essays. We all had different levels and details of social prowess. I was an extra-social-ballet-focused-student with a boyfriend on the basketball team and a burning brain. A girl with a need for eyeglasses that I hadn’t let myself wear since 4th grade.
Who was, up until the hospital, actively acing her core genetics lab. A paradoxical yet surefire sign of a soon-to-be inflamed brain, born of an increasingly unstable mind.
As the Vivaldi played, we tripped, fell, and quietly compared our bodies. Or, mostly it was me who tripped and fell. I have weak ankles and flat feet, which should normally dissuade any continuation of classical dance. Apparently not. I had dance in me and it wouldn’t let go. It held onto my heart like the tension in the skin of a drum.
The leotard squeezed onto my nothingness. The tights made my skin itch. Clean tights are best, but my body still doesn’t like those much. And the feet. The angry, aching, amber-red feet. Plus the shins, plus the mind.
I held them inside of me. Hugged them into my soothing soul, pulsing with empathy for the plight of my insides.
I sensed that I wasn’t the only human existing in this gritty and gutty world of silent suffering. My pointed toes pushed downward into the glassy wooden floor of the studio by the tragedy of not knowing who else. How many of us were there? I wondered how to find them; how to help us all.
As an active anorexic [ED-NOS, according to Kaiser Permanente California Medical Center,] one glance downward from another dancer meant the world to me. My heart would flutter at the smallest moment of jealous eyes touching the non-curves of my disintegrating frame. Weakness, however fraught, was beautiful to me. That is to say, only true frailty could express the level of rage I held inside my collarbones.
I twisted the rage around my bonesome fists like a rope. I felt it inside my sore eyes. The fury lived inside of the viscera of salted memories, housed near wounded flesh, an existential gnawing toward my terrorized child within. (An inner child who is now safe and loved. She’s here, with us, writing this story, as an adorable aspect of retrospect.)
The girl danced, a hypermobile ballerina from Petaluma, California. A girl who sure knew how to win.
The ligaments didn’t make sense, technically speaking. Neither did the joints or tendons. But, luckily, I avoided the doctor. My body could pretend to be normal for as long as I needed; this cost me the price of my mind.
Without getting into it, the psychiatric expense was just about the size of my destiny.
I walk out of Kaiser, now 31, like a spy. The man in the physical therapy department has helped my poor, poor feet more than any doctor ever could. I praise him and feel like I’m going to cry.
He calls me to follow up. I thank him five more times. When we get off of the phone, I actually do cry, overwhelmed by gratitude and the humanness of it all. Technically, he didn’t actually help yet, but the suggestions felt distinctly helpful.
I sit on the bench under the sun that they only provide at the offices in my hometown. Back home, still or again, at 31 years old. That’s what that glamorous eating disorder stuff will get you, kids, so don’t do it. It was one thousand times over not worth the subsequent suffering.
Really, it wasn’t even worth the suffering of the times of fasting themselves. Living through self-induced torture felt like a disgusting and strange way to be. The anguish of repetitive fasting wasn’t physical; it was a high and an addiction. I was getting a fix of weightlessness.
But the superficial and enraged obsession with smallness created a type of existential shame that I hadn't otherwise encountered.
I open my Chromebook as I wait for the pharmacy. The pharmacy closes as I write this, dramatically, so I’ll wait for the bus instead. I gently complain to the guy behind the pharmacy door. The hot younger security guy offers to open it for me. I decline, partially because I’m nicer now, but also partially for the theater of it. Both motives feel just fine.
The older man who closed the sliding glass doors comes over a while later, after everything’s locked up and the coffee cart is inside, and softly apologizes to me, too. He commiserates. He even adds in how much he dislikes Kaiser.
I thank him for being generous and reassure him that I found out later that they ran out of my mood stabilizer anyway, so he doesn’t need to feel bad and it was entirely alright all in all, and that I hope they can still change the pharmacy for pickup and he suggests the app and then he does prayer hands and gives many smiles in a row and I put my computer away and walk toward the bus stop.
I experienced the thrill of non-ceremony degree conferral earlier this summer. It was a balmy July while staying with my Aunt in Rhode Island. That day, I could practically feel the paper passing through the hands of the dean to be signed on the other side of the country. Dominican University of California, Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a Narrative Medicine Emphasis.
I sit quietly with my past child self at the bus stop that day. We are in the September sunshine. I am illuminated by the California air, correcting my posture for a recent crook in my neck.
I get to listen to the worries of this little girl, of seven-year-old me, a figment of self-therapeutic practices and maybe spirituality. I comfort her, I comfort me. She asks questions, gives me encouragement. I sit and breath and meditate. We become myself, merging into a nice timeline of a non-ballerina. We sit, and hold the crazy 19 year old young woman in our arms, on each side with her between, melting the icicles of the insides of her mind. We give her the sun. The bus arrives. I smile at the driver.
He says, “I’ve never seen someone so happy for the bus to arrive!”
I’m the only one on the whole bus. I laugh, smile, and thank him.
“Well, I mean… I’ve been waiting a really long time and I’m just glad you’re here!”
The little girl of my past self doesn’t leave. We sit in the middle of the seats, alone and together on the bus, child and adult. In the golden hour, I take a photo of myself, smiling. I am a little less than 200 pounds. I feel happy. I feel safe. I feel healthy. I am beautiful.
I am here. I am human. I’m me and I am alive.
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