For sixty days starting in September 2022, I had a leg to stand on. A leg. One.
My life winnowed down to the daily puzzle of how to accomplish basic tasks while on crutches, like entering and exiting my building before the heavy doors whacked me over, showering seated on a stool that advertised it could support 500 pounds when its seat was the size of a salad plate, and hopping around the kitchen on my right leg to prepare meals that I spooned into lock-lid Tupperware and loaded into the backpack I carried around everywhere, even inside my apartment, to substitute for hands. With a freshly sutured meniscus and a new knee ligament fashioned from my quadricep tendon and threaded through holes drilled into my bones, I wasn’t allowed to put weight on my left leg. I was grateful for any help from friends, but I hated that I
struggled to do the easiest things—taking my trash to the dumpster, washing my laundry, changing my sheets, putting on my shoes. For a full three months, I couldn’t sit at a desk without my knee protesting after only ten minutes as vociferously as a hungry infant.
And yes, I felt sorry for myself: It was the worst time ever, I thought, for me to be incapacitated like this.
Not because I had young children or pets to care for, a big job with big responsibility, a house I owned that needed upkeep, or a loving partner who counted on me to hold up my end of the relationship. But because I didn’t have those things. I’m in my mid-forties, the age when society at large says I’m “supposed” to have them.
The younger me never would have dreamed I wouldn’t easily attain these so-called basic milestones of adulthood, especially given I’m more fortunate than so many. Good fortune creates expectations to live up to—as one friend explained when asked how she maintained her 4.0 GPA through four years of college, “My parents could afford to send me here, I didn’t have to work while in school; what excuse would I have not to maintain a 4.0?.” Like my friend, I’m well educated. I come from some privilege. I’m reasonably attractive, clever, kind, and was taught how to stand up for myself and what I believe and given opportunities to do so. I’ve always worked hard, and am socially adept if given at times to being a dork. I also have a penchant for doing things my own way—partly out of stubbornness, but mostly because I unintentionally end up on my own path, only then to beat up on myself for not following “the rules” or jumping through hoops that my own critical thinking made me not buy into in the first place. Am I unconventional, or am I a failure, is a question that rises up daily in my mind like flames from a burning pie.
That “burning pie” question is what could be called, I suppose, my midlife crisis.
A knee injury and the torments of “phantom function”
As though there really is a pie in flames in my kitchen, the question creates a daily sense of urgency and anxiety: Don’t “burn the pie.” Don’t end up a failure. I feel this urgency especially because I moved to where I live now toward the end of 2019, just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. I moved from a small ski town; I felt I’d exhausted the advancement opportunities of such a place, and my life—socially and career-wise—had stalled. I was so intent on leaving that I moved to my new city without a job, and while I was lucky and found one fairly quickly, it wasn’t in a field in which I was interested or had any semblance of a respectable amount of experience, I was a contractor rather than a salaried employee, and the shut-in pandemic life of working from home and only meeting people over Zoom was hampering, to say the least. But then the lockdowns lifted, vaccines became available, my social world and options began to expand…and then…
…I injured my knee. The recovery from surgery was like the pandemic lockdown all over again. More than once, while crying, home alone with my knee wrapped in ice and propped high on pillows and my elbows and palms aching from the crutches, I called my mom. “I feel like in every area of my life, I just don’t have a leg to stand on!” I sobbed.
Through my tears, I and my mom had to laugh. Because not just metaphorically, but literally, I lacked a leg to stand on. Or that wasn’t quite true: I had one, my right leg, which was sore and tired from shouldering (legging?) the work of two legs. I wondered why the saying, “So-and-so doesn’t have a leg to stand on” wasn’t instead, “So-and-so doesn’t have legs to stand on,” since having one functional leg is pretty incapacitating, yes, but you can get around. Really, though, you need two legs—it’s what the human body is built to use.
You may have heard about how many amputees experience a condition known as phantom limb syndrome, where they feel the presence of the missing limb as though it still is attached to their body. Scientists used to believe the sensation was due to faulty neural signals delivered to the brain by the amputee’s stump, but further research confirmed that the brain creates a neural pattern that represents the body in its intact state. The pattern is like a “signature [that] inscribes the psyche with a sense of the body’s configuration and borders—and of the body belonging to an individual.” Even when a body part—a limb or even an organ—is removed, the neural pattern of the intact body remains intact. So a person’s physical wholeness and functionality remain inscribed on the mind as a kind of phantom, a reminder of what the person’s body once was and was able to do.
I hadn’t lost a leg, of course, only the use of it, and only temporarily. I didn’t have phantom limb syndrome so much as phantom function syndrome: I’d awaken in the night needing a drink of water or to go to the bathroom, and in my mind I’d feel myself swinging my legs over the side of the bed, sliding my bare feet into my slippers, and standing and walking around the bed toward the bathroom on two sturdy legs. And then the reality of my injury, like a surprise pie smashed on my face, would descend upon my awareness.
I’d feel my left leg muscles tighten protectively around my swollen knee, where inside a tender noodle of tendon tissue slowly was transforming into a taut, ligamentous bungee cord, and bone thickened around titanium screws holding the noodle in place. I’d stand on my right leg and reach with hands clumsy from sleep for the crutches I kept leaning against my dresser. My movements felt very not-me. I felt like a not-whole person, like an amputee of function; I was dysfunctional—that was the word I used with friends to describe my compromised mobility, and a wry hint as to my mental state, as well as a more darkly wry suggestion to myself of the state of my life at present.
Each day at lunchtime, as I pulled into the same handicapped spot in the park to gather the spirits-raising benefits of sunshine, fresh air, changing leaves, and the view of geese and ducks on the lake, I saw two men in wheelchairs visiting beside the restrooms locked for fall and winter. I wondered if they felt “not-me” in their movements, if they felt dysfunctional, if they wished every moment that they could stand, walk, feel whole—physically—again. In their presence I felt ashamed of my self-pity: I could reassure myself that my “dysfunction” was temporary (well, at least physically); they could not. Their disability was their new “me.”
I want to pause here and say that I certainly don’t view people with prosthetic limbs or people confined to a wheelchair as “not-whole” or “dysfunctional.” No way. I only wondered, each time I saw those two men in the park, whether they’d struggled more intensely or at all with some of the feelings I had in the thick of my recovery, as well as different feelings I can only imagine, and some I probably can’t, never having been in their shoes. If you want a powerful dose of inspiration, watch this short TED Talk by Amy Purdy, an all-around extraordinary person who at age 19 lost both her legs below the knee from bacterial meningitis and went on to become an adaptive snowboarder and two-time Paralympics medalist as well as a New York Times bestselling author.
Emotions, identity, and the body: Oliver Sacks’ A Leg to Stand On
Walk a mile in another person’s shoes. Stand up for yourself. Get your foot in the door; put your foot down. Pull someone’s leg; cost an arm and a leg; break a leg; talk the hind leg off a donkey; be on its last legs; get a leg up. Have a leg to stand on. The idiomization of these, on the surface, purely physical acts speaks to how closely emotions and the sense of identity are connected to the body. My incapacitation from my knee surgery affected me emotionally in ways I didn’t fully realize until I could walk again. As I thought back over the previous months spent on crutches, I wondered “where” I’d been. The person living through that time was not me, not just physically, but in every way.
While I was laid up, a friend and I had a disagreement that escalated. The mere thought of her being in my physical space with all of the hostility she was giving off made me cower, as though there were risk of her physically harming me, which she never would. I don’t love conflict, but I don’t typically shy away from it. Yet without the protective barrier of my physical well-being, and with my need for help and other people’s patience, I felt as vulnerable as a legless octopus drifting in indifferent tides straight toward a lurking shark.
The first time I visited the grocery store post-surgery, self-conscious with the certainty I looked like a shoplifter as I dropped my unpaid-for items into my backpack because I couldn’t carry a basket or push a cart, I nearly cried when a man cut in front of me in the busy checkout line. It’s not as though he hadn’t noticed my crutches, or my very conspicuous knee brace—thick, black, and strappy, it looked like a monster-tarantula from a horror movie—he thought those made me an easy target. Uncharacteristically, I said nothing to the man. No one around me said anything. The world felt like a terrible, callous place.
While on crutches I discovered that Oliver Sacks, in 1984, had written a book with the title, A Leg to Stand On. I thought I’d read most of Sacks’ books, and it seemed uncanny that I’d never heard of A Leg to Stand On until I found myself lacking a leg to stand on, both literally and metaphorically. It’s this intersection of our physical state with our sense of identity, the medical journey we undertake following illness or injury with an inner journey of spirituality or selfhood, that A Leg to Stand On is about.
“Take it easy! The whole thing, going through it, is really a pilgrimage,” a surgical registrar said to Sacks at the commencement of his long hospital stay following his unfortunate encounter, while solo-hiking a remote mountain in Norway, with a bull that severely injured his leg. He was bedridden for almost three weeks. For Sacks, simply being able to rise was a pilgrimage—an emotional as well as physical act:
“Until the actual moment of rising, it is as if one were never to arise: one is condemned (so one feels) to eternal prostration…. And…if this is so for every patient who is condemned to lie in bed…how much more so was it for me, given the peculiar and specific character of my own disorder, the sense of amputation, leglessness, of nothing to stand on.
“Rising, standing, walking pose for every bedridden patient [is] a fundamental challenge, for he has forgotten, or been disallowed, the adult, human posture and motions of uprightness, that physical and moral posture which means standing up for oneself, walking, and walking away—walking away from one’s physicians and parents, walking away from those upon whom one depended, walking freely, and boldly, and adventurously, wherever one wishes.” ~Oliver Sacks
It was the same for me: that sense of “eternal prostration” from having that most fundamental agency of movement stripped away or severely encumbered. I couldn’t even walk “freely, and boldly, and adventurously” to my kitchen to get a drink of water. This incapacity translated to an overarching sense of loss of agency—while my body was dedicated to the work of healing, I couldn’t attend to the flames of that proverbial burning pie but instead felt condemned to lie in it, while the flames consumed me, too.
Climbing mountains on pen and crutches
I’m lucky to live near mountains—hundreds of them, many with peaks higher than trees can grow. When life or people let me down, or when I need doses of solitude, beauty, and a sense of accomplishment, I climb mountains. My quadriceps burn as I climb up and up above tree line, and are reinvigorated when I wade through frigid creeks or skinny-dip in secluded high-alpine lakes. In the mountains, nothing and no one defines me; no one and nothing limits me.
Ascending these magnificent peaks by the power of my own two legs raises me above disappointment, hurt, sadness, and self-doubt. Or rather, removed from society’s insidious measuring instruments, I’m liberated to feel everything—lows and highs—and to absorb the truth that all feelings are as transient as weather, and what endures is larger than the fleeting contents of any single mind. The mountains that surround me—they endure, not because they’re eternal, but because they’re continually reforming and renewing. Renewal: That’s the needed reminder the mountains give me when I walk among them.
I needed the comfort of that reminder more than ever after my surgery. Yet I could not climb mountains on crutches—and yes, I tried. I pretty quickly had to accept that patience was the only condition in which my knee could heal, and the only way to preserve my sanity. I couldn’t deny that I was angry. Angry that my ligament and meniscus tore. Even angrier that they failed me when my life felt so empty, lonely, unremarkable, and I felt so unworthy, that I was middle-aged and hadn’t achieved several basic and obvious adult milestones, let alone my private ambition to write books. Angry—furious—that instead of being able to focus all my resources on rescuing that pie I mentioned earlier from the flames of my evident manifold failures, I was relegated to unexpected medical expenses, crutches, ice packs, and one working leg, while the pie, as I imagined it, continued to burn, until it might be too late to salvage it.
Too physically uncomfortable most waking hours to concentrate for long on anything, I couldn’t write. Not even in my journal, a refuge I’ve relied upon since childhood. Instead, I resorted to an unopened pack of notecards I found in my desk drawer.
During the multiple times a day I had to ice my knee, I scribbled my grumpiest thoughts about life and people and my darkest self-doubts, one per card, until all 100 of the cards were filled out. “Is it higher standards I need?” I asked on one card. “Being less nice? No. It’s saying more of this stuff you feel. But where? An pseudonymous blog?”
On another card: “Yeah I want to be a writer but I’m not good at it. I can’t finish anything.”
And another: “I don’t fit into anyone’s or any institution’s ‘box.’ Or, is this a reflection of my lack of good career planning?”
In the writing community, there’s endless talk about “platform.” Essentially, it’s your personal and professional network, or reach—how many people, by the power of your social media connections, to whom you can directly market your book, as well as your reputation, or how many people would buy your book because you wrote it. As one literary agent explained it to me, Beyonce could publish a book with nothing but empty pages, and people will buy it because she’s Beyonce. On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a previously unpublished writer and don’t have a large professional or personal reach, IRL or through social media, as this agent said writing-wise “you have to knock it out of the park.” Even then, I know someone who wrote a piece for Huffpost that alluded to the book she was writing and the piece attracted the attention of a major publisher. They were impressed with her writing and potentially interested in publishing her book, but said they’d only consider it if she had “at least 250,000 Instagram followers.” The writer only had 2,000 followers, and the publisher’s interest fizzled like a bad date.
It can be so disparaging to learn that beyond writing well—no easy feat, as no doubt most of us know—and beyond there being a market for your book, you have to be able to reach this market directly by power of your name, reputation, and digital/personal/professional network. You have to have a platform to stand on as a writer, not just proverbial legs. In the fickle language of fickle circles, where there are such entities as “important people” and “everyone else,” a synonym for “having a platform” could be “to matter.” For your book to succeed, you have to write brilliantly (well, sometimes—as one writing mentor says, “Writing is not a meritocracy”). You must have a platform. You must be important. You must matter.
Pies, lies, and the measure of our lives
Part of my midlife crisis or malaise, and what I suspect others might relate to—if only in the dark, private thoughts of sleepless nights, which is when my malaise loves to come out to play—is feeling that in the eyes of the world at large, I don’t matter. I haven’t amounted to the things I always believed I was “supposed” to amount to. I feel behind, though behind what or whom I can’t really define. I worry that my life is meaningless, even while my dignity rises up amid the
ashes and insists this must not be, cannot be, so. Walking together one day, a friend and I were discussing how celebrities are so quickly canceled if they publicly express a disagreeable opinion. I joked that with my lack of a “platform,” I could express the wildest, most disagreeable opinions if I wanted to and no one would notice or even care.
“It’s like I’ve already been canceled,” I laughed.
“That’s not true,” my friend said. “You just haven’t been discovered yet.”
I looked at her and grinned. It was like she’d taken my spirits—a bouquet of balloons whose strings were tied to my wrist—and untied them so they could float skyward at last.
In contemporary culture, what does it mean to matter; what is the measure of our lives? These are the questions I pursue in the book I’m writing (more on that in another post). I don’t have any answers. But being forced to consider closely what it means to have legs to stand on, I mused on why we talk so much about the legs, and so little about what we’re standing on. We could have sturdy legs, but be standing on a high wire. If we don’t know how to walk a high wire, that position is far more precarious than having no legs, but our stumps resting on solid ground. So the idea of having legs to stand on is about something within, not something external to us—something inherent, not physical. We talk like we know this, but do we? Do I?
I started this blog because even in my most self-abasing moments I believe I matter simply because I’m here. I believe every one of us matters. I trust that whether it’s that I’m unconventional or woefully flawed (or both), I’m not a failure, and that even “failing” doesn’t make one a failure. At the same time, I can’t shake this sense that there are indeed ways any of us can take more or less advantage of the privilege of being alive, that we can live a very full life or a less full one, which implies we can live a life that’s more meaningful, or less. (I wrote a separate blog post about this.) We can squander our precious life, or we can use up every delicious and bitter bit of it like licking the last morsels from the mixing bowl.
Seeking life fulfillment, and fighting for personal justice to eliminate or reduce what barriers we can to life fulfillment—this is our platform, these are our legs to stand on. And so the opportunity a physical injury or a midlife crisis creates to pursue and maybe be so lucky as to define the meaning of our lives is an opportunity for the kind of renewal that can help lead to a more fulfilling existence. We need legs to stand on. And we get to build those legs.
In her TED Talk, paralympic snowboarder Amy Purdy talks about the limitation, or what she calls the “border,” presented by losing her legs. She talks about literally having to build her own prosthetic legs because none of the available prosthetics enabled her to snowboard. “I’ve learned, she says, “that borders are where the actual ends but also where the imagination and the story begins…. It’s not about breaking down borders, it’s about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us.” That’s what Legs to Stand On means for me, and I hope for others, and for you, too.
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