The Injury
Learning to listen to my body and its limits
This post comes to you with a two week delay, for reasons outlined below. I’ve written quite vulnerably here about my disability & current physical challenges, and so have chosen to keep most of this post behind a paywall. Thank you for your patience and support as always - C
Among my boyfriend’s friends, there’s a term they use for the first definitive sign that you’re not in your twenties anymore - “The Injury”.
The Injury usually occurs at some point in your early thirties, when you push yourself a little too hard, and your body finally stops bouncing back. It happens in one of the places you never think about in your twenties, like your knee, back, foot or wrist. But once you get to 30, it’s like a switch flips. Suddenly, any cracks in your diet, sleep or exercise routine become massive fault lines in your physical health, and the things you could get away with at 26 do not fly at 31.
For many people I know, this is the wake-up call, to start taking proper care of their body. It’s also the first time they start grappling with their own mortality, and the physical limitations that will set in as they age. And plenty of people experience The Injury much, much earlier in life, sometimes even in childhood. Others develop chronic conditions that require careful management, and don’t have the luxury of ignoring their health & wellbeing.
For me, both of these experiences ring true. I started losing my hearing very young, and I’m now profoundly deaf. I wear a cochlear implant almost all the time when I’m awake, and without it, I can only hear you if you talk loudly in my right ear. Even then, the voices I hear sound muffled, guttural, with the higher frequencies missing. I’ve always been aware that the body can break.
And yet, at the same time, I spent most of my twenties believing wholeheartedly in “mind over matter”, and pushing myself to the absolute limit. In the run up to my art school degree show I went to bed at midnight and awoke at 4am every night for 3 weeks. I once stayed awake for 3 days straight to finish a commission project. My diet for the last four years has mainly consisted of Uber Eats takeaway, and my exercise routine was walking to the studio or working at the loom.
In all of this, my hearing was simply another hurdle to surmount, and I tackled it over and over. I only slowed down in 2018, when a minor head injury led to me losing most of the remaining hearing in my right ear. I could barely hear anything, even with hearing aids at full power. But I was booked to teach weaving workshops at a London arts centre, so I ploughed on. I’ve no idea if the students in that workshop noticed that I could barely hear them, but their weavings turned out fine.
In fact, I coped so well that I wasn’t even sure if I would qualify for a cochlear implant. One of the assessment criteria is something called the BKB test, which measures how well you’re able to understand human speech without lipreading. To qualify, you need to score below 50%. I expected my speech perception to be right on the borderline. I anticipated wrangling with the NHS to get the necessary surgery, and steeled myself for a fight.