When I was 13, I was on a girl’s softball team. I was behind in my skills as a newbie softball player and was way less athletic than the other girls. I had asthma, was overweight, and wasn’t allowed to wear a bra or deodorant (even though adults made it known they thought I needed both). In the spring season, we were practicing working on sliding into bases when I broke my fibula and tibia at the place where they connect to my ankle.
I remember the moments leading up to breaking my ankle but the actual moment I blacked out. I awoke to the blue, cloudless, sky. My teammates looked down at me - concerned, red dust wafting by…my body had somehow arrived at third base but I could not understand how. An ache drifted from my lower body and within seconds became unbearably painful. I could do nothing except sit straight up and wail in pain.
I was terrified to slide into third base. I remember standing there watching the other girls take their turns and distrusting the entire process. I don’t know if I made excuses to not take my turn or simply refused for a while but I remember my coaches being increasingly frustrated with me; encouraging me to just go for it.
When I get really scared of doing something with my body my eyesight sort of disappears and goes black. My vision splits, spins, and dissolves into grains of sand. I leave my body. I feel this sensation when I think about going up somewhere high, when I am somewhere high, or when I need to do something like slide into third base. There was no moment of peace or presence in my body when I slid into third base breaking my leg and ankle.
The physical trauma of my breaking my leg was compounded by every adult in my life not believing what I and my body knew; something was broken. I’ve experienced a lot of bone trauma in my life. I’ve lost a finger and had it reattached. I’ve had a head and spinal injury that almost killed me when I was three. the year before I broke my leg I had broken my arm. It was seven hours before my Mom finally gave in and took me to the hospital. By the time we got there, I was passed out from the pain and in and out of consciousness.
I sat on the bleachers waiting for our nanny to come and pick me up from practice sobbing while adults encouraged me to “get over it,” “it’s just a sprain,” “try getting up and walking on it,” and the kicker “stop lying…” One other girl on the team knew I was actually hurt. She was, to me, a star player and we weren’t friends so it surprised me when she stood up to the coaches. “Julia is hurt.” They tried to convince her I was fine and to have her come back to practice. But she didn’t. She knew what I knew; I was not okay.
My ankle and leg never fully recovered. I had surgery that required metal pins and frames to be drilled into my bones to repair the break. I did not receive PT. I learned how to walk by limping through the summer. When it is cold outside or going to rain I can feel it in my ankle. There is this phrase in the coaching, guiding, business, entrepreneurship, start-up, bio-hacker, and athlete world which is: do it scared.
Do it scared. Seems inconspicuous but motivating like one of those kinds of phrases you see on a planner in January before it’s chucked in the trash by March. “Do it scared” is thrown around by people as a way to say: listen, you’re going to be terrified to do this thing…your body is going to react to the perceived danger of putting yourself through it but if you want the results you have to do it anyway. And while that is true, you will have to do new and scary things, you shouldn’t do it when you are scared because when you do things when you are scared you get hurt. Sometimes really hurts… and if you have the wrong coach they’ll say something like “Get over it,” “It’s just a sprain.”
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