Just Grace

It was October of 2021, and I was frustrated. I had had foot surgery less than sixteen months prior to remove a bone spur blossoming on my second metatarsal joint, and now I was told I needed another. Cortisone injections weren’t working. Surgery was the only option.

My previous run-through of surgical recovery was fresh in my mind: the swelling, the lack of mobility, the agonizing hours of physical therapy, wearing that damn walking boot again. “How long will recovery be this time?” I asked my surgeon. “I need to be ready for auditions in the spring.”

Surgeons are a funny bunch. Perhaps spending hours cutting people open and sewing them back together messes with your head a bit. The prominent obstetrician who delivered my siblings and I wore white cowboy boots during the cesarian section, a sight so frequent in his OR that the nurses didn’t bat an eye. My surgeon now wore a pink bowtie and glasses that kept sliding down his nose. “Five weeks, six at most, and you’ll be back in dance class,” he said, not making eye contact once.

I was tired. I was out of options. I agreed, and scheduled my surgery with a receptionist on the way out.

If surgeons are funny, dancers are even funnier. They are athletes, but they are artists as well, the body becoming their medium. The flesh must be shaped with both broad strokes and fine points. In order to be art, the body can’t be human, and obsessive, repetitive training is required to shape the body into something else, something higher. But the body is either stupid or self-preserving. As soon as this sculpting practice is suspended, it reverts back to its original form.

I should have known something was wrong when the nurse took my cast off. My calf muscle was atrophied and flabby, the skin still orange from the iodine and hairy from two weeks without a shave. The incision itself, on the front of my ankle joint, was still fastened shut with black, hair-like stitches and crusted in blood. It smelled not quite rotted, but not alive, either. I looked away when the nurse removed the stitches.

I imagined that I was reborn when I excited the surgeon’s office, hobbling and grimacing in my boot. That the worst was behind me. I was wrong.

Five weeks turned into several months. By now it was mid-February, and I was starting to fray at the seams. My nightly pep talks with my mother on the phone became less and less affective at bolstering my spirits. Instead of moldable clay, my body had become calcified rock. Whatever happened to mind over matter?

My frustration grew, and my days started looking like this: wake up and ignore the throbbing in my ankle. Go to physical therapy and ignore the throbbing in my ankle. Attend ballet class, leave halfway through to cry in the locker room, and blame it on the throbbing in my ankle. Go home and ignore the looming homework deadlines, the dishes piling up in the sink. Binge on everything in my fridge and ignore how much I hate myself. Fall asleep with the lights on. Repeat.

Just once, I wanted to be seen. I wanted someone to hold my face in their hands and say I see you. I see you struggling. But no one did, so down I spiraled. I felt like I was stuck, literally. Stuck in a flesh prison that wouldn’t listen to me. Stuck in place as I watched my peers progress. What happened in Chicago was perhaps inevitable.

Important to note: I excel at self-destruction. I go all out. That weekend in the Windy City was no different as I drank and splurged and stuffed my face, using every poor coping mechanism in the book to distract myself from my own self-hatred. I’d planned to go to Chicago to attend an audition, only to bail at the last moment when it all felt futile. I hadn’t yet taken a full ballet class, my ankle still limiting what I could do. Was this cowardice, or self-care?

Hungover, heading home, and unable to distract myself any longer, I snapped. I called my mom, confessed everything, and begged for home, for help. My mother made an emergency appointment with my doctor, and by dinnertime the next day I was hospitalized.

What I remember most about my hospital stay was the embarrassment. Embarrassment at breaking down, embarrassment that people were seeing me at my ugliest, embarrassment that I was twenty-one and in the psych ward at a children’s hospital. The doctors weren’t particularly helpful, and my IV stung. Overall, it was a strange but necessary break.

I returned to school the next week feeling hollowed out and empty. Months later I would learn that I was in mourning, apparently. Shadow loss, they called it. Grieving for dead dreams, for yourself. Perhaps a piece of me really had died.

It was five months, not five weeks, before I was dancing full-out again (Had the surgeon misspoke? Had I misheard him?). Spurred into action by an approaching performance, I forced myself into my pointe shoes a week before opening night and…danced. Something clicked, or shifted, or stopped. It wasn’t great dancing, but it was more than I’d done in a long time. After months of grueling physical therapy, sweat, tears, and no sign of improvement, I suddenly just did. There was no final battle, no satisfaction of one last stand. I simply put on my shoes, dumbstruck, and went to take my place in the wings.

I survived show week. Afterwards, my family, peers, and the dance faculty congratulated me on a job well done, told me how proud they were, and how strong I was. Their words only made me itch.

This victory was hollow. I hadn’t pushed forward bravely. I suffered, and felt I suffered meaninglessly. Had my work finally born fruit? Was it simply the all-powerful healing prowess of time? An act of mercy on a withered soul? I didn’t know. I still don’t know.

Before the show, the chair of the dance department had given us all a speech. “This is a stressful time,” she’d said. “Give people grace. Give yourself grace, too.” Could I do that? Could I untangle myself from the mess of the past six months and emerge clean? Did I deserve to?

Perhaps I’m still in mourning, still grieving my shadow loss. Perhaps, a year after the fact, I’m still too close to it, needing to back up and see the forest instead of the trees. Then, maybe, I can answer these questions. It’s grace; how hard can it be to give? That’s all it is. Just grace.