This will be a ramble.
I’ve managed to break my arm. Injuries – by necessitating a convalescence – can quickly become an opportunity to reflect. I have a lot to reflect on.
I don’t want to say that (temporarily) losing the use of my arm has given me empathy for those who go about life one handed. That supposed empathy can become a type of mockery. Disability isn’t a costume to try on for a few weeks.
My left hand was never as functional as my right. My left thumb is not truly opposable. Over the years I’ve come up with so many workarounds that I almost forget. It comes up only when I must try new things; when I tie strange knots, or eat with fancy utensils. My thumb has taught me that you cannot compare a cast to a disability. A cast is its own excuse. I won’t be scared with this cast. “Are they watching? Did they notice?” – those have always been my fears as I fumble with a fork at a fancy restaurant or in front of a partner’s parent. Politeness is in many ways predicated on abilities and (for me at least) alienation comes from having different abilities. A broken arm isn’t different. It is so very normal.
My adaptations to my thumb were so gradual that I made them before I even noticed, most of them a very long time ago. A broken arm is sudden. It’s shocking to find that all my old tricks of dealing with my less functional left hand no longer work with it immobilized in a cast.
On a bike ride before the fateful one that brought my present contretemps, I thought about how often I biked and the illusion of fitness it gave many people. I’m small and I gain muscle slowly. I was not as in shape as people assumed I was from the amount I biked. This was fine; the world is not fair and your rewards do not equal your effort – something I benefitted from whenever I aced an exam I barely studied for. In a way, mountain biking – that I started it and that I stuck with it – was more impressive than any A I ever received in school.
Biking giveth and biking taketh away. Mountain biking, with its mad scramble over rocks and roots was giving me something I hadn’t felt in years: the heady glow of rapid accomplishment. I was getting better every week (even if it was more slowly than I liked; more slowly than another might). I was getting stronger and noticing it. It was rarer for my breath to come in great strangled gulps. It was rarer for me to pound on the brakes out of panic.
It is funny how panic works. Panic is what broke my arm. On my first trip on my own, I found myself caught in a thunderstorm, then in a hailstorm. The sky shook, caught in one continuous paroxysm of thunder. Eventually I could stand it no more and possessed of the desperate desire to be out and safe, I set off on my bike. Despite my fogged glasses and the poor visibility. Despite the treacherous roots and the path half turned to a river. I should have walked.
I’ve hated wet roots since I started mountain biking. Hit them at any angle at all and you will slide around. It was a sea of roots at the top of a hill that brought me down. I had no momentum left – no chance to cruise over them. I went down ponderously, right on my left elbow. I was two kilometres from the exit and it was still storming. But at least shock cleared away my panic.
The walk out of there was brutal, but it went oddly quickly. My mind was too occupied to mark the passage of time. I suspected my arm was broken and immobilized it as best I could (by forcing it through the strap of my backpack), then I set out. I got lost twice. I only made it out because a hiker pointed me in the right direction. I only made it home because a kind stranger drove me (it was a 7km ride from my house to the trail). My phone was waterlogged and useless.
I’m prone to an overwhelmed obstinacy and that’s what overcame me at the hospital. No, I did not want a change of clothes. No, I did not need to be dry. I didn’t care about my own comfort. I was simply overwhelmed by the thought of recovery – and the threat it might pose to my deliberately cultivated independence, hard won after a life of medical procedures.
A coworker once described my typing as terrifyingly fast. Now it is one-handed and slow. My thoughts never could keep up with my fingers before. Now they’re constrained to one hand’s plodding pace. The effect is meditative. I hope that this stage will only last for a couple weeks. It will be possible (even required!) for me to take off my next cast. Perhaps then I will be able to type as quickly as I’m used to.
My present inability to type has sapped me of some ambition for this blog. When I started it, about a year ago, I intended to have something to say every month. I surprised even myself with how much I ended up writing. I’d intended mainly to write fiction this year, but the excitement of seeing my thoughts clarified and written down overwhelmed me and I fell in love with blogging. Now I feel like I’ve almost run out of things to say and I’m not quite sure I want to bother to find more.
Maybe I will turn back to fiction. There are concepts and ideas that can be best explored via metaphor. And fiction is its own kind of joy to write. I know enough to know the type of stories I want to put down. I don’t know if anyone else will want to read them, but that’s never stopped me before. An audience is nice, but I do this for me.
The present seems momentous from inside the waves of history. It’s hindsight that allows us to tell the truly significant breakers from those that held only a false fury. I may look back on this in a year and laugh. Or this may be a turning point in my writing, however accidental.
One thing is certain. Expect me to write less until I get this damn cast off.