sad pelvis story (it’ll get better after you give up!)
the remarkable thing about pelvic bone separation is that according to the internet and every medical health professional I have spoken to so far it only really happens to pregnant people, so if you look up care and recovery options the only thing they’ll say is: it’ll get better after you give birth! Well Then, I say, shaking webMD lookalike number seventeen by the collar of their stupid starched shirt, shaking them so hard their neck snaps off and they die right there in my goddamn arms, what about the rest of us? What if there isn’t a baby splitting your pelvis in half like a chainsaw? What then?
it’s hard to talk about my pelvis without talking about the evil secondary school dance club and the eight-year-long mental health crisis and the remarkable PAP-endorsed notion of pushing through and overcoming and fucking annihilating adversity. They’re all tied up in each other, like headphone cords in a backpack, or five gymnasts in a game of Twister, or a DND fantasy-themed orgy. It’s not, as I was cautioned against yesterday, that I went and based all my personal worth and value as a person on dance. In fact, one might argue that that would be an easier string to untangle. You’d just have to cut it in half and yank the two ends apart and then boom— no more Liya; an endless world of possibility.
the problem is I picked happiness. So I’d still be a person if you took the dance away from me, you see, I’d just be miserable.
circles in the water. Shark circles. Finger circles, finger rings, rings of people trapping me in the middle of the circus, muttering to themselves about fire.
yesterday I went to dance class (my most recent mistake) and we flung objects around like sweaters and broomsticks and yoga blocks and then it ended and my pelvis went YAHOOBA and while I was lying on the floor contemplating the inherent fragility of man my professor came over and said you have to stop dancing for at least a week and I cried and my friend wandered back in and was like are you okay and I cried a little more and in the evening I called my girlfriend and cried again, cried into my cereal, cried into my nice Fruit Of The Loom (1871) shirt, cried in the bathroom with the cracked-open window. I cried to every single person who asked me if I was okay and then I did it all over again. What else is there to say? Take this lump in my throat and cook it. Throw it in the fire.
one time last semester a friend and I were hanging out in the weed dorm (my Humble Abode in sophomore year) and after we finished trading life updates she was like (a little incredulously, with feeling) damn bro, you are Doing Well. I tried to explain that the fact of my wellness was less a given and more of a series of lucky coincidences that had subsequently gotten tired and sat down for long enough for me to achieve personhood for the first time in my life and I don’t think she really believed me. I don’t think anyone really believed me when I said I was a clown in a fursuit at a furry convention doing cowboy moves and that if someone took off my cowboy hat I would immediately dissolve into a pile of fur, that I was grotesquely aware of how easily all of the good things could slip out of my grasp and that was why I was on anxiety medication, but maybe now they will. Which is a terrible thing. When one dons a clown suit your greatest nightmare is falling. Because falling means the end of the dream. And the end of the dream means no one will want to look at you anymore.
rest is good for you (even for a clown!). Given the fact that we live in a society, which involves, you know, capitalism, complete dissolving of work life balance, et cetera, rest almost has a patina of subversion to it, a sense of you’ve done something that you weren’t supposed to, a quiet roar of fury. Unfortunately, this means nothing to the Singaporean work ethic. In fact the Singapore education system is so uniquely constructed that at every juncture in the road anyone who isn’t thriving at full capacity gets quietly yoinked and is never spoken about ever again.
which, like, injury and mental health aren’t remotely the same thing. But they sure can affect each other and make out vigorously and fuck each other in the ass. My broken pelvis has fucked me in the ass. Like an earthworm hanging out. With itself. At six a.m. in the morning.
one— cows have an ambiguous number of udders. They definitely have multiple nipples and my friend and I thought about it and generally agreed that each nipple probably leads to a separate store of milk but is there one udder or are there four? Six? Nineteen? People have boobs. But cows aren’t people. We spent five minutes looking at photos of cow boobs and concluded, quite gravely, that there are some things in the world we will simply never understand.
two— among the activities not recommended for people whose pelvic bones have separated are the remarkably high-exertion activities “sitting” and “standing”. I was so stunned by this discovery in my English class surrounded by people who were also not answering the poor discussion leaders’ questions that I almost fell out of my chair. Which would have been better for me than sitting in it, apparently. Which would have been ridiculous. I can’t slide around my college campus like a fucking worm. I know I said I was a fucking worm earlier and I was going to fuck another worm but this is different. This is going up to a dung beetle and asking it to sing, to dance, to do calculus. This would kill a worm. If I were a worm, I’d be dead.
three— I emailed my school’s international student center telling them how fucked up everything was and they were like you should consider taking medical leave. All right, Karen, so tell me: if I leave, where the fuck am I supposed to go? There is no place on this continent that even vaguely resembles home and I can’t just buy a thousand dollar ticket back to Singapore out of the fucking blue because I’m not rich, I’m not well-adjusted and well-supported and happily connected to my large family of rich doctors and lawyers, I’m a college student and a dancer and an ex-depressed person who needs to not go back into that dark, airless hole, I’m scared to death of what the next five weeks will look like, I’m fucking
miserable. Didn’t go to dance this morning and I was miserable. Skipped taiko this evening and I was miserable. Sat in the new dining hall and chewed on cherry tomatoes and I was miserable, miserable, miserable. Crying’s off the agenda now because I’m tired but it fucking sucks, you know? Being injured is embarrassing (my most recent problematic thought). Not being able to do the things that spark joy in my life is embarrassing. Like I finally found a way to make myself not want to eject my body into outer space and now my pelvic bones have fucking separated. Google keeps screaming at me about pregnancy and my dance friends keep on going to their dance classes and I just sit here with my sad angry bones and my angry lonely heart, hurting and hurting and hurting, and I write. I write about how pelvic bone separation occurs in between 1 in 300 and 1 in 300,000 vaginal deliveries. I write about how I am not part of this statistic. I write about what it’s like to love yourself in a way that finally makes sense to you, and then have that wrenched away.
I write my sad pelvis story, because I can’t go over there and tell you about it. I write an email to my professor. I write a hundred apologies.
I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.
