Awesome Disabled

(4-minute read. CW: childhood trauma, trauma history in general, some ankle and knee issues.)

Have you heard of the book The Body Keeps the Score? So have I. I’ve tried to read it, but I get scared that it would trigger my traumas. So I keep putting it back on the shelf.

However, I imagine that it is about how the body keeps the score. You see what I did there? So impressive, I know, and it only took me two university degrees to be able to do it.

It’s about trauma in the body. Our brains protect us from trauma by magnet-wiping the hard drive every so often, but our bodies keep that shit forever. I think that a part of my reluctance to get in touch with my body has been that I don’t want all these trauma memories coming out. Even exercising is a trauma-healing practice for me, because of the layers of trauma memories stored in these muscles, tendons, and joints.

I’ve heard that a lot of women have trauma memories stored in their hips, and that hip flexor exercises can unlock some of those traumas. I don’t find that so much for myself– what I think of is my mom telling me how I shouldn’t do those exercises in public because people will be able to see my cooch. I suppose that’s a form of trauma, but not the same as other hip-related trauma.

This week at my physiotherapist’s office, I discovered a new, fun place trauma lives in my body: my knees. I learned this when I tried to do a single-leg squat. I thought I could handle it, but nope–panic. My heart thudded, my other foot desperately slammed onto the ground and I grabbed my physio’s arm, trying to catch my breath.

“Maybe we don’t do single-leg body weight exercises?” I gasped out.

“Of course” my physio responded, and gave me modified, two-legged exercises.

I think my knees are a vulnerable part of my body because they’ve never really been particularly strong. Growing up as a hypermobile, spectrumy kid and teen, my knees and ankles were extremely floppy. But I healed quickly, so no one really bothered too much about all my injuries. I was stoic and didn’t often show pain (especially not to my parents when I was a child, because girls were supposed to suck it up– Eve and original sin, don’tya know?), so I shut my yap.

Knee injuries are especially awful because they affect your ability to walk, and they mean that you’re reliant on other people for mobility help. Even if you “only” need crutches– you still need someone to take you to the doctor then take you to the medical supply store to pick them up. And if you’re sensing a theme, I did not have faith in the people in my life to take care of me. Without medical help, I was stuck hobbling around on my own, until it hopefully healed up okay. In my teens, I messed up my ankle because my bike folded in half around my leg while I was going down a hill. I crawled home and lay on the couch to rest. I did use crutches to get around that time, but that was because I had bought them the week before at the thrift shop on a whim. It was summer and my parents were working, plus I was the oldest, so there wasn’t anyone to care for me. I just hung out on the couch for a while until it started feeling better on its own.

Now that I think about it, I probably have layers and layers of un-cared-for traumas in my legs and knees, which is why they feel so vulnerable. I think my body is keeping the score, and my knees’ score is about negative 100. I gained some weight with my two pregnancies, then I gained, then lost, then gained again with my early-motherhood breakdowns, as I struggled to keep myself going through it all. This fluctuation probably made it that much more difficult for my knees to feel like strong roots for my body.

And now I’m doing my two-legged squats, to try to strengthen the small muscles around these knees. With intentional work, these legs have gotten much stronger than they ever have been. My hips don’t feel good, and my knees don’t feel good, and my ankles don’t feel good, but they’re getting stronger. And hopefully they start forgetting the score.