Lying on my mat, I am struggling to lean into the position that the others are holding. I compare myself to my neighbor, limb by limb, checking whether my knees are too far apart or too close together and if my foot should be pointed or flexed, as though I’m studying a pair of line drawings to find the discrepancies between them. For one, the grimace on my face is absent on hers. We are doing what our instructor refers to as inner-thigh toners, but my center of gravity is off, and my leg is trembling, and a fire is starting inside my hipbone.
It’s hard to believe I was once so active that my family called me a tomboy. As a kid, I was enrolled in three sports at any given time. In the winter, you’d find me climbing and rolling down icy snowbanks for hours on end. I spent my summer evenings playing street hockey with the boys on the block or doing handstands on the grass until bedtime. I didn’t mind the impact of my bike slamming against the road after riding off an elevated curb. It didn’t hurt to press my belly hard against the uneven bars in gymnastics to swing my weight around them. I’d usually pretend I was a ninja turtle or Peter Pan, but when I did play with barbies, they were all divers and gymnasts. I’d come home from school with torn tights and bloody shins, happy to recount how I earned each mark of bravery and more amused than dismayed that healing could not be accelerated by picking off scabs.
Then, in a somewhat sudden unraveling, I went from always moving to fearing movement of any kind.
Endometriosis, contrary to popular belief, has little to do with my pelvis and periods. It extends its wrath from my lungs to my ligaments, making it hard to do what a person is typically supposed to do without a second thought, like breathe and pee and walk. At my worst, I avoid picking things up off the floor because the pressure caused by bending down can induce vomiting. I debate whether showering is necessary because of the energy it costs me. I stare at my feet to reassure my brain that they’re neither in flames nor missing, trying hard to be patient with my glitching nerves. Daily pain with endometriosis is an alarm that only knows loud and louder, regardless of what aches or pulls or sears or pangs. Breathing hurts my knees, a full bladder triggers an unrelenting migraine, and leaning ever so slightly against the kitchen counter sends a shockwave from my abdomen to my ribcage.
Somewhere along the way, moving became secondary to survival.
Between surgeries, my physical therapist and my osteopath gently encouraged me to find a way back to movement, as my healing seemed to depend on it. They drew my attention to where I stored my tension, how shallow my breath was, how distorted my posture had become. My proprioception—my body’s innate awareness of its position in space—had been hijacked by constant pain, leaving me uncoordinated, unbalanced, unwilling.
My first re-entry into movement a few years ago was through water. Being in water was intuitive and familiar, like coming home or crawling into bed. At first, I felt heavy and unable to fill my lungs, but as I returned to the pool day after day, moving through water became safe and liberating. One can’t stay afloat in the deep end with balled fists and slouched shoulders. I’d practice noticing tension and releasing it—I’d spread out like a starfish, shake out my limbs, dangle like a corpse. The water taught me that holding tight is way easier than letting go.
Moving freely on land proves to be a whole other challenge. During the pandemic, life led me to a yoga teacher who specializes in chronic pain. She worked with me to chip away at my fear of worsening my pain. First, we tackled mindset, then movement. “When you find a place where you feel safe, linger. Explore what feels good,” she advised. “And remember to smile; make your practice joyful.”
Now, to further expand my comfort zone, I’m on a mat in a ballet studio trying Essentrics, a low-impact fitness technique that combines principles of tai chi, ballet, and physiotherapy to stretch and strengthen every muscle in the body through fluid movement. Our instructor is inclusive; with every exercise, she offers up to three possible modifications in case safety and stability feel out of reach. Though she speaks to all bodies, a furtive glance around the room informs me I’m the only one opting for these modifications. That’s okay, I soothe myself, except that even the easiest modification feels pretty damn difficult.
Nothing is intuitive. I am exhaling when I should be inhaling—that is, if I’m not holding my breath altogether. I forget to engage my abs. My shoulders tickle my ears until our instructor reminds us to straighten our spine and grow longer with each movement. Even my brain has to work hard; it has always had trouble with mental rotations and mirror images and rights and lefts. My windmills are clumsy and choppy, and the more I try to match people’s movements, the more I lose sight of where my own arms are in space.
When we switch positions, I notice the tears on my mat. And around the bend of my chin, and on my face. I’m sure our attentive instructor has noticed too. I reach for my water bottle to grant myself a break. I drink and dry my cheekbones and watch all their bodies form one fluid movement like the bows of six violins. It’s so beautiful. Lucky them.
It’s tempting to envy these neighboring bodies without knowing anything about them or their own quirks and kinks. It’s tempting to turn against my body, to bully it for standing in my way.
Putting myself in a room with others often rattles me this way.
I also know how far I’ve come and I’m proud for showing up and for trying, especially since I spent most of the afternoon trying to conjure up any excuse to skip the class, simply because staying home feels safer. I know it’s not about doing all the moves or excelling at them, or even about getting back to how I was “before”.
Healing is not a reset.
Even in my acceptance of this, there is still grief. It lives in the folds of my joy. It rears its head and roars and buries itself again, there, not far beneath the surface.
I wipe the tears off my mat only to watch more drip and pool. My chin is quivering as I hold my plank, but I just breathe. I breathe and cry and cry and cry. I linger in child’s pose where it feels good and safe. And then I know that my crying is my release, all my pent-up energy gushing out, my body softening in response. It’s my surrender—all guards down, unwinding from red alert and its deafening siren.
I leave the studio with one blazing thought: I’ll have to show up again next week.
your writing is light and beautiful, even when you are speaking of heavy and painful things. It truly is an amazing feeling when you come to understand how your body releases, what is comforting, what is challenging. <3