Content warning: Descriptions of accident/injury and reference to domestic abuse.
Author’s note: Edited from the originally published version.
I knew I shouldn’t have been cycling late at night on those dark, steep hills back to the neighborhood, not when I was already soul-tired, but some wounded part of me had taken over, and they needed to get out.
I had realized that, once again, I had re-created my childhood living situation: stuck in the ‘burbs without transportation, isolated from my friends, I fall back into binge-and-restrict patterns, trying to force creativity; body shrinking as my mind unravels.
Now that I had seen, I was a fountain spewing toxic negativity, pushing up the first, long incline with fuck-this-shit on every breath. As the part of me that was still 17 muttered, “I want to get out of this state,” the chain on my bike popped off, as if my thoughts had thrown it. Feet clipped into the pedals, saddlebag side-heavy from too much farmers-market food to gild my cage, my legs spun wildly and I couldn’t get out. Descending in slow motion, still attached to the bike, all I could do was watch.
My left hip hit the ground first: one of those impacts where you know instantly there is life before and after this moment. I bounced back onto my sacrum as my right leg wrenched around in the socket from where the foot remained stuck to the pedal. I finally came to a stop lying on my back, bicycle and person and bag tangled up like a beached turtle in a net.
I slowly dragged myself to a sitting position, cars whooshing way too close to my head on the black street, and released the Velcro straps on my shoes. Wriggling my feet out with my hands, I knew I needed to drag myself and my fallen steel-frame steed, lights still flashing, out of traffic’s way, so I tried to stand.
Nothing happened.
My brain was sending signals to make my legs move, and for the first time in my life, they simply… wouldn’t.
The words shattered pelvis shot through my consciousness, and I tried to deny them. We had been in plenty of wipeouts before; surely this was no different. “Come on, legs. You can do it. We gotta get up,” I begged my limbs, tears streaming down my face. But my lap lay there limp, this body that never seems to behave.
I clearly needed help, and started screaming and waving my arms, trying to catch someone’s attention. But nobody stopped, not in this country and especially not in this state; just another fallen cyclist in a world of cars. I don’t know if it’s true, but I couldn’t help feeling like if I had been in Europe, somebody would have stopped.
I also would have been able to just go to the hospital and get the care my body desperately needed. But here in America, I don’t have health insurance; the premiums alone are unobtainable for this particular freelancer. Calling an ambulance wasn’t an option; the last time I did that, I had coverage, and I still got an $800 bill because the vehicle wasn’t “in network.” Apparently, while whiting out during a suicide attempt, I was supposed to stop and ask the ambulance driver if they took Blue Cross Blue Shield.
When I gained the sense to fish my phone out of my pocket, for some reason, I dialed my mom; perhaps I needed to enter fully into the teenage memory I’d re-created. My frantic tone triggered her trauma, too, and the response was exactly what I would have expected at the time of the original wound. Hanging up even more shaken, I sent an emergency text to the group chat with my housemates, and mercifully, one of them was home. He showed up beautifully, greeting me with softness and warmth, and once I was a little more calm, we tested whether I could stand.
I couldn’t. We had no choice but to take me to the emergency room.
I’ve never been more grateful for the work I do with other medicines than I was during this experience, having learned that the way out is always through. It was clear from the beginning that this was all supposed to happen; there have been synchronicities around the accident like any medicine journey. When they admitted me, it was to room 33: the number that appears to remind me I’m being protected. A friend even had a premonition about someone breaking their bones as integration from a recent journey we had shared. What’s more, the space where I live is adorned with a monumental mural of Frida Kahlo; the face I see every morning upon waking is the gender-bender who became an artist after shattering their pelvis, and I’ve since received immense clarity about the way forward being to focus, simplify, slow down, follow my new creative path and listen to my heart.
This is part of the journey: initiation by pain.
But sometimes it’s hard to tell when pain is part of the process and when it’s the byproduct of a broken culture. It started from when the computer system practically malfunctioned trying to input the X-gender from my out-of-state driver’s license, even though this state has had such options much longer than my native Washington. I waited to enter the E.R. until it was fixed, but correcting the wristband didn’t seem to solve the problem, the pain worsening all the while.
It shot in white-hot, cutting through the numbness, when they laid me on my back in that hard E.R. bed with no hip support. The injuries I had sustained were all around and in front of and behind the places where the top half of my body attached to the bottom, and there was no way I could sit or lie to escape it. I now understand that there is a kind of physical agony I didn’t even know was part of the human experience, something akin to what I imagine childbirth must be like: as if my lower half had been doused in gasoline and set on fire. I scrambled around the little bed, swimming in a sea of coarse, thin blankets and writhing like a caged animal, trying to get out of my own skin.
It wasn’t the first time.
Everyone kept she-hering me—something that, to cisgendered people, may seem like a trivial matter, but has massive impact. It’s hard to convey, if you’ve never experienced being constantly disaffirmed in who you are at your core by the culture, and even friends and family, your whole life; even asking someone to imagine what it would be like if they were called the opposite gender in a hospital situation doesn’t capture the enormity. Misgendering and other non-affirming treatment has been proven to negatively impact health outcomes, and the American Medical Association now urges clinicians to become more literate.
Clearly, that hadn’t happened where I was. When I managed to correct someone in between breaths, it usually was instantly forgotten (for example: “She wants to go by they/them pronouns”). Worse, the gaslighting extended to my pain; whether the two phenomena were related, I couldn’t say. One nurse in particular seemed to think I was faking it, telling me at one point when I asked for help, “I have patients with real problems.”
I don’t want to knock nurses; they are some of the world’s most hardworking people, and they provide a level of service to humanity that, so far, I can only aspire to in this incarnation. I get it, it was Saturday night in the emergency room, and nobody knew how to make me more comfortable, including me.
Besides, I had to remember where I was. This was the place where they pump you full of Oxycontin and Norco, but confiscate your cordyceps and chaga and lock them in the pharmacy safe, because “the science isn’t out” on functional mushroom supplements and how they interact with powerful opiates and NSAIDs. They wanted to pump me full of morphine and run me through the gamut of x-rays and imaging, which I was resisting with every fiber of my being.
This is the place where you have to ask how much those tests are going to cost first, even when you’re experiencing a kind of pain you didn’t even know existed; where you’re texting friends in between drug-induced blackouts trying to find a low-cost clinic to drag your broken body for an MRI. It’s the place where their system is going to take you for all you’re worth, even if you have nothing to give, because this is what it means to be uninsured in America.
Way too recently, I had a bad ankle sprain while across the pond. While they weren’t much better with pronouns, I was wheeled from the emergency room into x-rays and an exam, none of it cost me a dime, and I left feeling like a human.
Yet similar messages to the ones I’m receiving now were trying to make themselves known back then. When you don’t listen, the body has a way of insisting.
In the hospital, I found myself repeating a narrative I didn’t want to reinforce: I have no money, no assets, and a shitload of debt. I cannot pay for any of what’s happening, I kept telling them. But it’s the place where they tell you not to worry about that and focus on your healing, never acknowledging that the stress of a bill that could force you into bankruptcy will almost certainly land you right back in their care, and maybe that’s the point.
So I resisted as long as I could, but eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and started saying yes to everything, the drugs and the scans. There is a time and place for morphine, and this was definitely one of them; I’m far from opposed on principle, and was grateful for the relief when it finally flooded through my veins.
But there was another unforeseen consequence: When they started sticking things onto and into my body, I was suddenly transported to the day I tried to die in Texas. Again, alone and moaning, bare ass exposed to the stark room with electrodes spattered across my chest like so many electronic sperm; a needle in my arm plunging me into dreamless depths. I knew this experience would come back; I hadn’t fully dealt with it yet, but I was very far from resourced. I started hyperventilating, reliving how they tried to send me to the psych ward, my “salvation” being delivered from the usual 72-hour hold back into the arms of my abuser, instead.
Yet this is the institution dedicated to health where you tell them you’re having a traumatic reaction, and they say: “We don’t have anyone who can help with that here.”
The scans revealed that my pelvis was broken in four places—five, if you count my fractured sacrum. You can’t make this kind of symbolism up, the sacrum being the seat of femininity, emotion, and creativity. The nurse who had doubted me stood in the doorway after the fact and timidly admitted, “I didn’t think it was going to be broken.”
None of it is anyone’s fault, really; gaslighting is what keeps the whole Global Northern capitalist framework running, but that doesn’t make any of it okay. We learn to distrust ourselves, each other, and anything that isn’t spit out of a computer, panel-tested, and peer-reviewed; where nobody can tell you what foods and herbs will naturally support your body’s ability to recover from your injury, and the food from the hospital kitchen will probably kill you faster than whatever they’re trying to cure. (Literally everything was cooked with margarine—I didn’t think anyone had done that since 1998.)
By reliving my own traumatic experiences, I was reminded that it’s the same framework where few people report domestic violence, because when you do, nothing really happens. It requires reliving your trauma by writing down every instance of mistreatment you ever experienced from the person while sitting alone in an office, bringing all that horrific material to the surface, then just leaving it there; unsupported by anyone with mental health training before or after the experience. Then you put yourself through hell each time you go to court and don’t know if the person will be there, or whether that’s worse than when they can’t find them at all.
Even if a restraining order is finally granted, there’s nothing they can do to enforce it until it’s already too late. According to statistics, which are certainly lower than reality, nearly 3 in 10 U.S. women (29%) and 10% of men have experienced rape, violence, and/or stalking by a partner; it’s 40%; for lesbian and 60% for bisexual women; 26% of gay and 37% of bisexual men report the same. While reliable data isn’t available for gender-diverse people, I assure you it’s higher.
It’s the framework that calls you a “survivor” when it’s really making you a victim. The one that pathologizes everything, attributing afflictions like addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolarity, and ADHD to something broken in your brain that will require lifelong maintenance. Yet researchers like Gabor Maté, Carl Hart, Johann Hari, and Eiko Fried are revealing that these conditions are caused not by genetics, but trauma—meaning they can be reversed. They’re the symptoms of disconnection, a social disease where compassion and community is the cure.
But it’s easier to target symptoms than looking at the systems in which they arose; to heap the burden of healing on individuals rather than trying to change our societies. Reducing people to diagnoses they must treat through “care” they have to pay for, not to mention the total lack of social safety net, reflects American capitalist culture’s general disregard for human life. It’s the place where it’s easier to lock people up for being “crazy,” an “addict,” or a “criminal” than to help them shift the parts of their lives that drove them to seek relief through any means necessary; where the suffering have to choose between getting help and being saddled with a tab they’ll never settle.
It’s the place where they tell us it’s all our fault, because we didn’t work hard enough, supported by a scaffolding of learned helplessness; where those in positions of power maintain their advantage by making the less resourced believe they have a chance to get ahead if they tug hard enough at those bootstraps. Yet our frameworks reward the already privileged while designated “experts” gatekeep knowledge and resources, teaching you that you can’t trust yourself.
We’ve been taught that we need doctors and therapists to cure us, but our bodies and minds have remarkable abilities to heal themselves, given the proper support. Most of our medicines are derived from plants in the first place, while herbalism and systems of holistic health keep entire societies healthier than much of the industrialized world. And we’re kept from exchanging this information with each other, locked up in little boxes ordering from Uber Eats and Amazon, creating tiny lives instead of the interconnected networks that define every natural ecosystem.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a time and a place for the emergency room, morphine, and spending a few days in the place where it’s literally everyone’s job to take care of you. Anything can be medicine or poison, depending on the context. But when the context is that getting the medicine can send you into bankruptcy or reactivate trauma you’re not resourced enough to resolve, you need a new prescription.
So the underrepresented do what we’ve always done, turning to our networks of community and care, relying on traditional sources of knowledge and healing. It’s what I’ve done since getting out, and have found healing that transcends the physical. But where we’re going as a species demands more: We must see the unseen and marry the archaic and modern, living together and sharing the load; forming underground railroads, physical and digital, that connect the under-resourced across this nation and between continents. There are already people living the solutions, but it’s hard to reach those who don’t know how to be found; to keep your chin up in the midst of the pain.
I don’t know what the answer is. But I know it starts with trusting the animal of our body to tell us what it needs; the knowledge that people without letters after their names have carried for generations; and each other. It involves seeing ourselves as part of, and containing, interconnected systems, where the impact on one affects the whole. .
As for me, I’m learning that healing can be slow and asynchronous. Wearing diapers, bedridden and learning to feed myself under Frida’s watchful eyes, I am all the ages at once: cycling from wondrous newborn baby to frustrated child, rebellious teenager, wise adult, and elderly crone in any given hour. It’s beautiful and terrible and all part of it.
I see that I was stuck in a self-defeating feedback loop, and what you resist persists, coming back tenfold. You feel trapped? Now you can’t walk. Want out of this state? How about you can’t get out of bed. Feel like a burden? Now you need those people you didn’t want to ask to help you shower, change clothes, and even dump your piss buckets. It’s not punishment, though, it’s tough love.
I have been humbled and hobbled, vulnerable and exposed. First the blood and now the breaks; my body is coming back online by being torn apart. And I needed to wake up. Like Ram Dass, I love my pain and wheelchair; I’m grateful. I see more clearly every day, as I’m forced to take it slow and listen to the subtle sounds of spirit and animal. I can no longer hide from who I was and am becoming, and I must be brave enough to show it; to go for what I really want and need.
Ram Dass also said no life, no matter how pure, will ever be enough as long as you still believe you’re not enough; as long as you think that you can touch love, but never be love. As a friend recently told me, instead of looking everywhere for love and light, the trick is to recognize that already are it.
We all deserve care, but we also must take care of ourselves.
Thank you to the liberator who realigned my perspectives. This is training for the new world and all that comes after. It’s the place where, if we stay strong, help each other, and do the work, we get the chance to be reborn, over and over and over again.