Stranger Danger

As a child, many of us were taught to beware of strangers. We learned the mantra of “stranger danger” which meant that strangers represented a risk. But what if the stranger is actually a part of yourself? What if what you’re afraid of is a part of you that experienced something traumatic, something so difficult that you don’t wish to relive it so you treat it like stranger?

I’m actually having to dictate this post. This is because I am recovering from surgery on my right wrist, which happens to be my dominant hand and therefore I can only use one hand to type. Being limited in this way gives me plenty of time to think. And think I have, about so many things, and specifically how I ended up in the situation in the first place. To understand how I got here, I need to go back a few months.

Back in April of this year, I started dating someone new. I’ve been single for quite a while, by my own choice, so I wasn’t really looking to meet anyone. But life takes turns and there I was being approached by somebody that on the surface seemed like a perfect match. He presented himself as wanting the same things I did and ready to advance into a full relationship, too quickly I learned in retrospect, but at the time it seemed okay to me. The relationship started off well, he seemed to offer me so much and was willing to do anything I wanted just to please me. It was a hard sell and I realize now I was being groomed. It wasn’t long before it took a turn. The attention that first seem so positive, soon became suffocating, even creepy and uncomfortable. As the days passed, I became increasingly more and more uncomfortable about the relationship and didn’t know what to do. Inside a part of me was telling me, in fact screaming at me, to get out. The voice inside my head warned me that I was in a situation that was only going to get worse. My discomfort was a warning that I should not be in this relationship.

I tried to ignore the voice and instead set some boundaries, which were quickly crossed, suggested some changes, which were ignored, and struggled to deal with the situation. I continued to try to manage my emotions which were yelling at me to get out and just dealt with one day at a time. Then one night I fell.

At this point he was coming over every evening and I was cooking almost every night. Dinner was ready and I was just getting the last few things to bring out to the coffee table when I slipped I landed hard on the kitchen floor, twisting my knee, banging my ankle, and cutting my hand on a knife that was sticking up in the dishwasher. It was a stupid fall that landed me in the ER for stitches on my hand. My boyfriend was eager to play the rescuer and took me to the emergency room and doted on me for the rest of the evening. Luckily, I did not break any bones that fall and after a few stitches and some ice on my knee I was back to normal within a few days. I have spent my life with legs of different length and an ingrained fear of falling; I hadn’t fallen in over a year. I thought of a lot about why I felt that time. I concluded that my energy was off; I was scattered because I really didn’t want him here and I became distracted. Still, the voice inside me got louder, yet still I didn’t listen, at least not enough.

Once again I tried to make some changes. I wasn’t ready to call it quits even though every cell of my body wanted it to end. I think it’s due to some sort of twisted sense of duty and obligation that I have from growing up that keeps me loyal in bad situations. My brain was constantly churning trying to come up with a solution well knowing the inevitable had to be done, but I didn’t have the nerve to act on it.

About a week after I had fully recovered from the first fall, I fell again. I was walking out of my bedroom when I slipped and landed and what must have looked like a pratfall because I landed flat on my back. But, when I landed, I turned my arm up and hit the top part of my wrist which shot intense pain through my arm. Once again I had hurt myself, but I was prepared as always and just reached for a wrist brace that I had from when my daughter was into rollerblading. I put that on my wrist and continued with my evening. This injury took longer to heal, about 2 to 3 weeks of wearing the brace before my wrist felt strong again. Once again I chalked it up to my energy being scattered. But the voice inside kept telling me it was more than that, yet I still wasn’t totally listening. The situation continue to worsen and soon I could no longer ignore the screaming inside me. I finally took action to end the relationship.

The night that I ended the relationship, I went to sleep with a feeling of huge relief, I had done the right thing; I was free from of a bad situation. But the next morning when I woke up, my lower back had seized up; I was in so much pain that I could barely walk. I was surprised by the situation, especially since I had felt so good the night before. I had experienced this type of pain in my back before. The last time was when I was going to have breast cancer surgery and I had so much anxiety about going back into the hospital after so many years away from it. That situation was stressful, understandably so; it made sense that I would have this fear built up in my back which caused me paralyzing pain. But in the case of ending my relationship, I felt relief from leaving a bad situation. So why did I have this pain? The only thing I could conclude was that the pain was built up from all those emotions that I had pressed down, all that time of managing being around a person who was driving me completely crazy. That’s what I thought the pain must’ve been from. I was partially correct that it was about something I had been ignoring, but it wasn’t my emotions, it was my inner voice that had been warning me for so long that I was in the wrong situation.

A couple of months went by and everything was fine. I had released all the drama of the relationship and was back to being single and independent, working hard, getting strong, losing weight, and feeling great. Then, on the eve of Labor Day, I was getting up off the couch, put my right footinto a flip-flop. I turned to get the other flip-flop on my left foot when my right foot slid and I landed down in a weird position, banging both my ankle and wrist, and then slipped a little further and hit both again. It was late at night just before bed, the pain was incredible but I didn’t see any reason to go to the emergency room. It was a holiday weekend, and most likely I had just sprained them, a bad sprain, but what could they do for me at the ER? They could give me crutches, they could give me ice, but I had both already at home, so I just went to bed.

I chronicled some of this in my previous post so I won’t repeat but basically the long and short of it is that for two weeks I went about my life as normal, doing my best not to hurt my ankle or wrist more but otherwise living my life while dealing with intense pain throughout. Finally the pain wore me down, and I got x-rays which showed that had broken those bones, hence why the pain was so intense. I immediately went about trying to see a doctor. But between insurance, which took 5 days, and then hurricane Ian who decided to appear, I could not see a doctor for two more weeks. So now, more than a month since my fall, I go to see the doctors (of course they set separate appointments for each injury) and one told me that my wrist needs surgery. It was healing, but not in the correct alignment, which meant that I would have limited mobility in that joint. Since it was my dominant hand, I did not want to take any chance of reduced mobility. I agreed to the surgery which was supposed to happen the following week, but it took two more weeks to get scheduled. My ankle, luckily, was healing fine they said, wrapping my ankle up in bandages, and send me home in a bigger boot that I could walk on.

During those two weeks that I had to wait leading up to the surgery, I continued to ponder why the fall happened in the first place. What did it signify? What lesson did I need to learn? No answers came. I’m also in therapy and we have been talking a lot about setting boundaries, honoring myself, and paying attention to the warning signs of when my boundaries are crossed, specifically in my past relationship. I have been doing a lot of soul-searching and learning a lot about myself, yet no matter how much time I spent thinking, I still did not understand the lesson of the most recent fall. It wasn’t until after the surgery that I finally got the answer I had been seeking.

Before I tell you the answer I learned, I need to explain the logistics of how this surgery, and these injuries, have affected me. The boot on my ankle limits my mobility, but at least I can walk which is a huge improvement to using crutches. In order to change my clothes I need to take the boot on and off so as to get my leg in and out of pants or underwear. I also need to take the boot off when I go to sleep or when I take a shower. The straps are very thick and strong Velcro; the grip is extreme. With my wrist being compromised on my right side, my dominant side, it has been challenging to remove the straps of the boot with my left hand. But, until I had the surgery on my wrist, I was still able to use my right hand a little bit so I hadn’t really experienced the full challenge yet. I knew, however, that once I had the surgery I would not be able to use my right arm at all for several weeks.

Yesterday I had the surgery, and when I awoke in the recovery room, I started to feel intense pain in my wrist. The pain was so strong that the doctor offered me a nerve block which is where they inject some type of numbing agent into the nerves. What it did was numb my right arm completely from shoulder to fingertips. Now this is when it gets interesting. I have never experienced numbing like this before. I have experienced all sorts of types of anesthesia and when I’ve had my teeth worked on I know what it’s like to have your mouth numb, but this was totally different. A whole appendage, my right arm, was completely numb. I knew something was attached to my shoulder, but beyond that I could feel nothing. Intellectually, of course, I knew that my physical arm was my same normal arm just numb, but when I touched it, it felt like a stranger’s arm. I can’t explain but that is how it felt. My real arm, as it seemed to me, made its appearance, but it was just a phantom, or spirit arm. This spirit arm, as it were, was how I imagined my arm to be in physical space, but it did not match where my arm actually was. When I would look at my arm I would not see the same location that I thought it should be, instead, my spirit arm was always separated 3 to 4 inches away from where my arm really was. This is why I felt that my physical arm was a stranger to me because it was like it was not following what matched in my head, like it had a mind of its own and not a part of my body anymore. This was the strangest feeling because sometimes I would bump into my arm and it would startle me because it was not in a place that I expected it to be.

I developed all sorts of emotions regarding this arm, the stranger one. On the one hand I knew consciously that it was a part of my body which was numbed because it needed to heal and would return to me as normal, I just needed to protect it. On the other hand, I grew to resent it in a certain way and I had moments of thinking of wishing it gone, chopping it off even because it felt so foreign, so alien. Thankfully, these feelings were fleeting, I have no desire to injure myself, but I don’t know how to express how strange it was to have part of me not responding to my wishes whether to move or be where I expected it to be. This got more intense when I went to bed. I could only sleep on my left side with my right arm propped on a pillow. With no strength in that arm, it was quite complicated to get into the right position. I would doze off and move my left hand eventually bumping into the right one which would startle me awake. It felt like I was sleeping I was sleeping next to a stranger. I even had moments of feeling like I was lying next to someone that was no longer alive; it was just so disconcerting I can’t explain it. That feeling of the spirit arm not matching with the stranger arm, of having two different arms in space, continued throughout the night.

At one point I started to feel angry because I couldn’t sleep. My arm was disturbing me so much. It was not acting in the way that I wanted to. No matter what position I got into, my right hand would always be in a place that I was not expecting and would startle me. It was then that I started to get angry and finally got the answers I had been seeking so many months before. This experience of being disconnected from a part of my body made me realize that the stranger arm actually represented the part of me that had gone through so much trauma, so many medical procedures, and had born the brunt of all the pain. That stranger was more than just an arm, it was that whole inner self that I had refused to listen to over and over. The only way that I was going to get past this repetition of injury was to embrace that part of myself.

I had made that inner voice a stranger to me because I never wanted to be that person again. After 27 or 28 surgeries in my lifetime, most of them before I turned 18, I felt that I had been through enough. I did not want to be the victim anymore; I did not want to be identified by my trauma. While that is a valid goal, I still needed to acknowledge all that I had gone through because it is a part of me. It’s a part that others see and if I acknowledge it, I can let them be a part of my healing as well. It requires me to recognize that I need help from time to time and by allowing people to do that, it also allows me to put myself first. I need to prioritize myself and not feel guilty about it, whether its getting out of a bad situation or just finding better shoes so I don’t slip on the floor.

As with everything in life, it is a process. I will try to allow more people in, to be more open about my experiences past and present, and to welcome the love that so many show for me. I will then share that love to the part of me that was a stranger for so long, allow us to merge and hopefully become whole.