A Body At Rest

For Me, Not An Option

I like to move, a statement that anyone who knows me even a little would call an understatement. To say I’ve got it in my head that inertia equals death would be more accurate. I don’t know when this compulsion to keep moving started, or why, but it’s been a part of my psyche for so long that I simply indulge rather than examine it.

One day last week I was home, doing Pilates. Nothing too crazy with ropes and pulleys, just your basic mat workout. I was attempting to go from high plank to side plank to forearm plank and somehow (the details are hazy, since I often enter a mindless fugue state when exercising) I did not have my right arm placed properly underneath my body when I changed positions. I collapsed like a marionette whose strings were suddenly severed onto my right side, which sounds like no big deal, since it was from my plank height of, say, a foot and a half onto a yoga mat atop a cushioned floor, but trust me, it was.

You see, I wear my bones very close to the surface. My ribcage is a layer of parchment paper skin away from exposure. When I went down, my ribs took the brunt of the impact.

I can’t really explain what happened, exactly, or how it felt, or even describe the sounds my skeletal system made, but can tell you it was deeply disturbing. There were a series of pops, like my ribcage and spine were made of Rice Krispies that had just been doused with milk, like snap, crackle, oof. My first thought was, this isn’t good, a thought which has aligned with all my subsequent thoughts up to and including now. This has not been good.

Not that it’s been terrible. On a pain scale, minus dramatic effect, it’s somewhere between a 2 and a 3 with the occasional momentary 7/8. But it does make me realize how fucking fragile I am. If only I had the self-control to allow my body to rest long enough to heal! But then, I wouldn’t be me, would I?

I think that my takeaway is that I am incapable of growth in this area. As Popeye the Sailor Man once observed, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I yam what I yam.” But I will get through this injury, because one thing I’ve learned for certain is for people like me, in lieu of time and common sense, there’s ice and ibuprofen.