#5 - Things I Wish I Knew-sletter

Sincerest apologies to my body 🤸

When I was five people couldn’t believe how fast I could run. I had bad asthma but was still quicker than all the kids in the surrounding area. I loved what my body could do.

By the time I was ten, some people had caught up. That was when I noticed my knees were bigger than a lot of my friends. Their ankles looked different in socks to mine too.

At twelve, I was chubby and started high school. I don’t remember any of the kids saying anything, but my Dad made fun of me. Grandma said my uncle grew out before he grew up and predicted the same for me.

She ended up being right, but I still had to go running with my old man three nights a week while we awaited that growth spurt. It has only now dawned on me why I’ve had a lifelong aversion to running.

Age sixteen I was six foot and lean. Agile for my size. Could jump high. Coordinated. They were incredible natural gifts for playing sport, and that’s what I did.

I say all of this in hindsight, because at the time all I remember thinking is what’s with these knobbly knees of mine?

At eighteen I was fast once again. But I was also the slowest person over four kilometres in my elite junior football team. I guess that asthma came back to haunt me because I had no stamina.

Pre-season time trials caused me a great deal of mental discomfort. I would feel sick all day at school in the lead up to them. But that was nothing on the physical pain that was to come.

I wished my body could glide around the oval for those 18 minutes, but instead it would leave me desperately gasping for air and on the brink of asphyxiation. Two years later, I decided I appreciated oxygen too much to take sport seriously.

When I was twenty, I still went to the gym and stayed active. I was doing enough that no matter what I ate, I could keep any excess weight off. For some reason that mattered to me. (Thanks Dad). And so it went until I was in my early thirties.

It was about thirty-two when I noticed my body couldn’t do what it used to. I still tried, but the result was creaking out of bed the next day, stiff and sore. It looked as good as it ever had, but was starting to feel a lot more lived in. Then at thirty-seven things really slowed down.

I woke up one morning with a “cervical radiculopathy”. In lay person's terms, I had a severely pinched nerve in my neck, and it rendered my dominant left arm useless. There was no position I could put it in that wasn’t painful. It meant I couldn’t sleep.

As a result, I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t even walk - my favourite pastime. It took six months to settle down, but still hampers me to this day. From that morning on, I’ve wished for any of the previous iterations of my body back. The big or the breathless, because they were pain free.

Now that I’m forty, I think a lot about how painful my body might be by fifty. I am fearful at the possibility of living without some of the fine skills I’ve had my whole life at sixty.

These days, the only time I think about my knees is when they’re giving me discomfort, which is often at the moment. Probably a bit of karma there.

I care little for how my body looks, but a lot for how it moves.

If I was to have one piece of advice for anyone that’s concerned with their body’s appearance, it would be to instead marvel at how it works and focus on being grateful for what it can do. Things like:

• The way your muscles move in unison without you even realising.

• How it can delicately balance while you tip toe into a slippery shower, waiting for the water to warm up.

• The specific micro movements your fingers make to pluck a flower from your neighbour’s garden.

• How it automatically reacts with cat like reflexes when you feel a spider web on your skin.

• Those extra few centimetres your arms and shoulder stretch when you reach under the bed for an AirPod. And;

• How your back beautifully bends to pick up a five dollar note from the ground.

I wish I knew how incredible my body was sooner. We’ve had a heck of a ride and I wouldn’t trade it for anyone else’s. I hope it knows that.

ZP / NpG

Got thoughts? Send me an email me at [email protected] - I love reading your “letters”.

Until next time, be kind to yourself :)