The ache in my bones

Lessons in satisfaction with this imperfect human form

I call my parents one morning after another sleepless night, wrestling with my restlessness. The conversation turns to health check ins, as it always does, and especially lately, when in their 70s they are contending with their own pains, and me in my perimenopausal 40s, I’m dealing with my own. It turns out we’ve all woken up that morning with such an intense ache in our hips that making it down the stairs has proven a struggle for all of us.

How can it be that we’re miles apart, decades apart, lifestyles apart, and at the exact same time, our bodies are somehow in harmony, singing the same discordant tune?

Research into epigenetics increasingly shows that our bodies carry the interrupted and disrupted messages of our ancestors, such that we may feel things we do not understand but which make perfect sense upon looking back at our shared origin stories.

Human DNA changes in response to fight or flight scenarios. Repression and suppression occur at a physiological level, out of defence and survival. Certain genes get switched on and off in reactive response. Subsequent generations, born to those who fought or fled, therefore inherit an internal structure that is wired to be on the defensive, responding to things that have not occurred in its timeline, but the experience of which lingers like an ever-present shadow.

"I’m tired of lamenting the sorrows of the past."

I told a writer friend this recently, in a moment of defeat and dejection, after turning over and articulating the gold from the dirt for some article or another. This friend reflected back at me what I know but sometimes forget in the thick of woe, that my intention and my process is to unravel, resolve and dissolve, that I’m not lamenting, but untangling, and in the process, becoming free.

The issues in my tissues

While kneading into the knots around my hips, my physio asked me if I’d been stressed lately, given that I cannot be reasonably faulted for the ways in which I work my body. Because in that, I am well versed, maybe too much so (more on that later). Stressed as in tense, wound up and bound up, in battle mode.

It’s true that in writing memoir and personal essays, I seek to resolve, reclaim and re-empower. But lately I’ve been getting stuck and stumbling, wondering - what’s the use, how does it help, to relive and retell, does it not in some way keep it on repeat? The wondering and the doubt crept in partly after contemplating the words of a couple of my meditation teachers, who suggested that we need not be defined by past stories, that it’s not even our responsibility to repair them. I agree and I don’t.

And there lies the tension.

As our bodies pertain to movement, as our hips give us (or hinder us from) the ability to move, it’s interesting to note that much of the trauma endured by diaspora communities, by forced migrants, is connected to movement – to being on the move, being hurried along, being made to run, mobilising out of fear and in response to threat. And alternatively, being hampered, stalled, interrupted and diverted.

My family is no longer running. In fact, they’re comfortably settled now. As am I. Relatively and gratefully content, sufficiently resourced, and for the most part, unconditionally loved. Like sediment that sinks from the surface to the floor of the ocean, like the debris left on the shore after the wind has stopped whipping at the waves, has the settling opened the way for delayed exhaustion?

I’ve somehow felt responsible for telling the truth. I believe in challenging misunderstanding, in clarity, integrity. Words can empower and undo the disempowerment that silence, whether chosen or forced, can lead to.

You’ve got to feel it to heal it

I remember being sceptical when I first heard a yoga teacher say that our hips store emotional energy. I remember feeling irritated when another yoga teacher, when instructing a class into pigeon pose, said that some people love while others hate it, because of the anger or sadness it can prompt.

I don’t like to be told what I should or might feel. It puts me on edge, gets me thinking, when that’s not the point of yoga, to cognize. While I’m all for explaining and understanding the why of things, and may have pissed off/influenced practitioners when I’ve articulated similar, this experience put me on guard and made me question why I wasn’t getting the deep messages from sensations that were not intense enough. The instruction might have helped others in the room. For me, it felt like the pointing out of a failure. A failure to feel what my body apparently should but didn’t, no matter how far I pushed it.

And so I was left with another reason to berate this physical form that I spent a lot of my earlier life harshly and unhelpfully beating into submission. And now, I wonder, is this why I suffer, a consequence of all the ways I’ve pursued the dissatisfactory and deluded battle to control this unruly bag of degenerating flesh, bone, nerve and muscle? 

Why, why, why, ours is not to reason why ... is it?

There’s a phrase that popped into my mind recently, from a former era of punishing gym routines and a fixation which went from a healthy regard for my body’s functionality to an unhealthy obsession with seeing how heavy, fast, hard and lean I could go: “get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

I hear this phrase whenever I feel aggression creep into the way I approach certain movements in an effort to demand my hips recover their strength and mobility, going at them with every tactic I can think of.

This is dissatisfaction as it manifests as the constant need for betterment, the desire to get fitter, stronger and faster; a desire which mercifully, no longer drives me, this being my “f- it 40s” years where the hormonal changes apparently free one of the excess regard for social norms around appearance. Perimenopause as liberation perhaps, a forced state of caring less.

"Give it up," I wake up thinking one day. "Don’t give up, but give it up." The 'it' being the fight, the struggle, the tension.

Give up asking why? How much does it help to keep probing? To a large degree it furthers understanding, dispels judgement, enables compassion when we come to know something which then dismantles the assumptions and projections that led us to castigate or dismiss someone or something unfairly. But what if/when asking why keeps us stuck in a loop, with the incessant insistence on knowing more?

“You’re too deep,” people used to tell me when I was young. Because I wondered, pondered, considered possible answers to all the whys of people’s ways. “You think too much.” It was a fair comment, I did, I do.

It seems I am now being forced to listen to my feelings more instead. Is it ancestral trauma, is it years of harsh physical practices, is it perimenopause? If I know why, I can fix it. I think. Maybe there’s no fixing though. Old age, sickness and the inevitable decline. The past is the past, that can’t be changed either, no matter how many times I dive into it.

When the body says back off

I remember my Mum swinging her legs up the wall against the headstand of her bed after a day at work, having spent upwards of eight hours on her feet, working and domesticating. She was in her 30s and 40s then. Now she works as a carer and still spends most of her day “running around”. Still, she doesn’t rest. My Dad is the same, technically retired but in all practicalities, still working.

At a very real level, it’s no wonder things hurt. "So, stop, rest, relax." I tell them. Just as they’ve always told me not to work too hard, all the while doing exactly that themselves. I’ve had more choices around it though, in many ways thanks to them and their support.

I wonder if the responsibility I feel is tied up with a compulsion to reciprocate generosity, gratitude, the compulsion to demonstrate value and worth. All this wondering is tiring. I feel my hips hurting.

And so, enough. That’s enough. For now, that’s it. I don’t have the answers, I’m not sure I can fix things, and maybe that’s (the way to make it) okay.