We are all made of scars

What if we’re not strong at the broken places?

I spent the morning scrolling through results for the search, “vertigo while running.” It’s my latest “weird thing” with my body, and these three words were the only way I could think to describe it, although it seems unlikely to be vertigo — at least the classic vertigo caused by an imbalance in the inner ear. What I feel, more illogically, is as though my brain is operating my body with marionette strings. Every movement feels awkward and my feet don’t quite land where my brain intends, like a puppet flailing across an off-kilter stage. As the imbalance persists I become increasingly dizzy and feel as though the ground is rushing toward me, just like in the psychological thriller “Vertigo.”

When I Google “vertigo while running,” what I find is the conclusion that I am either dying or dehydrated. Although both of these causes are probably true, the root of this particular weird thing is almost certainly psychosomatic. It has to be the anxiety, I tell myself. My morning anxiety has spiked recently, and unlike labyrinthitis, anxiety is at least something I understand.

As I stood from a prone position on the floor, I felt a sharp pinch in my side — pain caused by an injured rib. I have been blaming this pain for my weird running vertigo since the injury is also something I can trace to a tangible source — a source that is plausibly anxiety-inducing and proprioception-disrupting. Six weeks ago, I was caught in a swirling, sand-choked wind gust while running in Canyonlands National Park. Amid the blinding centripetal force, I fell hard on my right side. This fall aggravated and likely re-injured a 17-month-old case of cracked ribs. The pain isn’t terrible, but it’s stubbornly persistent, and it’s enough — enough to cause me to fixate on falling, to fixate on the emotional pain I was mired in when I went out for that run on a bright November day in 2022, to fixate on the sharp crack of my chin hitting a rock and the agony of dragging my aching body four miles home.

My rib began to throb, so I bent over and clutched my side. April sunlight poured in from the bedroom window, illuminating shiny white pockmarks on my upper thigh — puncture scars from that time a pit bull clamped its jaw around my leg while I was hiking in Acadia National Park in Maine in 2001. I circled each scar with my index finger and smiled — 23 years and these scars are still a part of me. And how afraid of dogs have I been since then? How hard have I had to work to not give off terrified vibes to every big dog I meet on a trail — since terrified vibes tend to make dogs suspicious and escalate an already difficult situation? I’ve worked so hard for 23 years. I tell myself I’m no longer afraid of dogs. And still …

After exploring the bite marks, I knelt down to observe other scars augmented by the glaring sunlight. There’s the scar from the time a chainring bit my knee and I crashed out of the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow in 2013. It still looks like I lost a fight with a wolverine. There’s the time I tore my knee open on Sanitas in 2017. The raw, pink scar still looks like it could have happened last month. The wound from March’s dust devil still looks rough — that’s probably going to become a long-term scar. The crimson mark sits directly below the inverted skin-colored gash from the time I rear-ended another cyclist on the Homer Spit in 2006 and went over the handlebars. Both knees and lower legs have become a dynamic patchwork of scars, bumps, scratches, misshapen toes, and swollen ankles. I remember the stories of these scars more vividly than the happier outcomes of benign adventures.

I turned over my left leg to search for a scar above my ankle. I hoped to see any remnant of a wound from June 8, 2021, when my bicycle chainring again bit into my leg after I went over the handlebars while riding with a friend in St. George. This crash happened just hours before my last moments with my dad. For weeks after he died, I would fixate on the scab, running my fingers over the torn skin to remember that this happened, and Dad was there, and there was physical, tangible proof that this had all taken place. It’s the kind of magical thinking we all cling to when grief is fresh — as long as I had this scab, I could still hold on to the day that was the last day I’d hugged my dad, and perhaps it could still be that day.

But the scab healed, and now there’s no trace of it. It was my life’s most deep and affecting wound, and it miraculously didn’t leave a scar.

“This isn’t right; this has to be healed by now,” my physical therapist said as she drove another needle into the muscles nearest to my thoracic spine. I’ve been seeing my physical therapist monthly since a truck driver hit me with his side-view mirror in October 2021. An X-ray revealed no fractures so my PT concluded it was soft-tissue damage. But she was perplexed when I kept coming in month after month with the same complaints. How does such pain persist for three years? My PT recommended I read “The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain.”

In the book, psychotherapist Alan Gordon postulates that people can solve their chronic pain with “pain reprocessing therapy” — a protocol to connect mind and body and heal physical pain through the power of mindfulness. My PT warned me the ideas in the book were “woo” but worth considering. After reading the book, I concluded that the hypothesis made perfect sense. After all, I have greatly benefited from addressing psychological pain through this mind-body connection via eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR.) Why shouldn’t a similar technique work the other way around? All pain originates in the brain.

I worked on Gordon’s reprocessing techniques. I feel like I’ve made progress, although occasionally, and especially lately, the familiar back pain still haunts dull workdays at my desk, long flights, and time spent in the car. These setbacks seem more related to my current state of anxiety rather than any physical changes that might affect my back. When my psychic pain deepens, so does the physical pain I carry in my scars.

I’ve long clung to the simple wisdom of this Hemingway line: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” This is, after all, the quest of the endurance athlete — to push ourselves until we break to become stronger. And yet, biologically, this doesn’t make any sense. If something breaks, what you’re left with is a scar. Scars are never stronger. They’re a patch, a haphazardly applied strand of duct tape, and they’ll never hold up to repeated gougings the way unbroken skin can (ask me how I know this.)

As we move through life in this harsh and cutting world, we only accumulate more scars. We’re increasingly pieced together by a patchwork of second-rate cells. And this goes for our psyche as well. We’re reshaped by the dogs that bite us, the near-drownings we endure, the humiliations we bear, the intense fears that arise from adventures gone poorly, the loss of our most cherished loved ones. Before long, we are made of scars.

How can we be whole again? We can’t. Painful scars are a burden we all bear if we are lucky enough to live long enough to be broken repeatedly.

On Monday afternoon, I parked outside the AdventHealth Avista Hospital in Louisville for my weekly allergy shot. I’ve repeatedly complained about how much I dread this treatment that I’ve been going through for nearly eight years. It’s a time drain and it makes me feel ill and I’m not sure the shots even do anything. Still, the science says I’d be a full prisoner to my allergies without this treatment. It’s not a perfect bandaid, but it’s better than chronically obstructed airways.

Allergy shot day is never my favorite day, though, and I was especially grumpy as I walked toward the hospital on Monday. The air had an unfriendly chill and the colors surrounding the building seemed off, like an underexposed photograph. I heard a gentle rustling sound and looked up to see — for the first time in Colorado this year — delicate green leaves. Since I live in the foothills where late winter still holds a firm grip, I was astonished to see signs of spring. When I looked back toward the sidewalk, I noticed something strange about the tree’s shadow. I must have stared at the ground for 30 seconds before I realized that these odd shadows were the crescent shape of the sun partially blocked by the moon. The eclipse was happening. I had genuinely forgotten.

It’s not like me to let any notable celestial event go unacknowledged. But I had been harboring some resentment that I hadn’t made more of an effort to visit the path of totality. After all, I’ve read the Annie Dillard essay and I believe her when she says “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” And yet, I doubt any eclipse experience could ever live up to my experience with the partial eclipse in 2017, which I watched with my dad from the top of Gobbler’s Knob in the Wasatch Mountains. It was such a unique experience to share with my dad and so meaningful that I could never recreate it. I don’t even want to try. So I ignored the 2024 eclipse entirely. I didn’t buy eclipse glasses. I forgot all about it.

As I walked away from the mesmerizing shadows, I noticed an older woman sitting in a wheelchair outside the emergency room. She was wearing silly paper glasses and looking up at the sky. She removed them as I approached.

“Could you see it?” I asked her. “The eclipse?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s incredible.”

“I saw it in the shadows over there,” I said, pointing down the street. “There are all of these tiny crescents in the leaves.”

She turned and handed me the glasses. “You must see this,” she said.

I put on the dark glasses and looked up. The sun looked like an orange slice with a bite out of the center. The woman said the moon reached 65% coverage but I had missed the maximum by about five minutes. As simple as the image was — orange on black, heavily filtered by the cheap glasses — I had to agree. It was incredible.

At that moment, I wished the woman would tell me her life story, if she had ever experienced a total eclipse, and why she was at the hospital. Instead, I handed the glasses back to her.

“No,” she said. “You keep them. I need to go back inside.”

So I did keep them. I made myself 25 minutes late to my dreaded appointment as I sat outside a hospital in the cold wind, wearing silly glasses, neck craned toward the sky. The orange crescent slowly grew larger as the world’s colors returned to normal. I pulled the glasses off and put them back on, again and again, uncertain about the source of my awe — was it the eclipse, or was it the world?

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” (Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms.)

I know we go on because we continue to be a part of it — all of this infinite greatness — even in our flawed, infinitesimal brokenness. We form our scars, embrace our grief, and adapt so we can keep going. And while I don’t necessarily feel strong in the broken places, I’m grateful to still be in a position to be repeatedly broken by the world — after all, as Hemingway points out, there’s only one alternative.