Most of us remember the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. In that book, the stuffed rabbit has only one aspiration in life- to become “real.” What he learns over time is that becoming “real” is a painful, exhausting process. To become “real” means letting time and love create scars, tears, and stains, not only on your body but also on your heart. When the velveteen rabbit finally becomes “real” through that unforgiving crucible of time and love, he truly understands the multi-faceted nature of “reality.” Far from feeling disillusioned or grieved, he rejoices in his epiphany. Feeling “real” is worth it.
This story always resonated with me. I, too, spent most of my life longing to be “real.” I looked around me and everyone else seemed to have vibrant, momentum-driven lives. I saw their lives- marriage, children, benchmarks, traditional celebrations- as integral to a kind of perpetual regeneration of life and culture. There seemed to be an authentic order and rhythm to their lives. It felt like a “real” life was something that happened inside you. “Real” people embodied their lives organically. For me, life was always something that never came naturally. It happened outside of me, and I worked extremely hard to pretend I was part of it all. I never quite fit. My efforts to be “real” were always awkward and ultimately, unsuccessful.
What I have learned, through my own painful and exhausting process of reality building, is that I made a fundamental error in my understanding of “real” life. I somehow believed that the only “real” life was one filled with marriage and children. For a lot of my life, my attempts to fit into “real” life were attempts to fit into a “real” life that was not my own. Now that I am worn, scarred, torn, and stained, I have been learning to become the “real” I am supposed to be. It is a reason to rejoice.
However… my heart may be healing but my body, not so much.
A year or so ago, I started dancing to help with the heart-healing. Music and movement are beneficial techniques to improve mental health. I don’t do anything fancy. I am mostly just listening to upbeat songs and playfully moving as my body wants to move. I tend to describe it, at least to myself, as moving with wild abandon. Not being the kind of person who is ever wild or abandons anybody, it makes me feel delightfully edgy. I only spend about 15-30 minutes a day on this activity. It helps quite a bit. Dancing to cheerful songs with catchy lyrics is just fun. It makes me feel lighter and more joyful.
Max and I met at a dance. He remembers that meeting (and subsequent times when we went to dances) fondly as times when we took over the dance floor and had people admiring our dance moves. I think he is projecting. He was an excellent dancer. I mostly tried to keep up without humiliating or injuring myself. Still, he unleashed the revelation that I really liked to dance, despite an incredibly elevated level of klutziness.
A few weeks ago, I was dancing in the living room. Instead of the faster, lighter songs I typically use, I was gliding around while listening to my spiritual music playlist. I like to listen to those songs and to dance to them when I feel like I need to calm myself and be more present in my body. Ironically.
I say ironically because I tripped over my own feet or my pants leg or a speck of dirt or something. I lost balance and got way more acquainted with my living room floor than is healthy. I yelped and let out a cry. It might have been called a scream. Max did not hear me. As I lay on the floor, I assessed the damage. I had not fallen on my head, so that was good. My left arm, especially around my elbow and forearm, hurt. The skin on my elbow was torn up and I was bleeding. I noticed that I seemed able to move, but I wasn’t exactly sure how or where I was going to go. My inclination was to use my forearms as leverage to hoist myself up off the floor. Given the pain in that region, that strategy seemed inadvisable.
After several minutes on the floor, I realized the pain was not going to immediately disappear. I began to inch my way across a few feet of hard flooring, using my good arm and my core muscles to propel myself forward. If you have ever seen my core muscles (and no one has because they are indiscernible), you can imagine how inefficient that process was. Finally, I reached for an armchair. I used my right arm to lean against the seat of the chair to work my body around to a position from which I thought I could rise with minimal pressure on my injured left arm.
Minimal pressure is a relative term. Putting any weight at all on the left arm aggravated the screaming, inflamed tissue. Luckily, I managed to get to my feet pretty quickly on the first try. I sat down in the said armchair for a few minutes and then got up to apply sufficient bandages to keep me from ruining the furniture. My arm kept hurting.
I truly expected that I would have an impressive bruise the next day. I did not. In fact, despite some distinctly noticeable level of pain, ten days passed with no sign of contusion. As is typical for me, I told myself it couldn’t be as bad as it felt because there was no bruise. At the ten-day mark, a large, dark, painful mark surprised me with its vehemence. It took a couple of days to fully blossom, but it was indeed an impressive bruise. It was about 10-inches long and multi-colored. I could even describe it as polka-dotted at first because the differences in coloration were significant. My whole elbow, a good portion of my forearm, and a couple of inches above my elbow practically shined with darkness. In some places, patches of an even darker hue gave me the polka-dot look.
I’m about two weeks into the bruising process and the area is starting to fade to a weird yellow color. I have been able to break the Tylenol addiction I acquired in the wake of the injury. I am certainly on the mend.
The lesson here is that sometimes “reality” is not what you think it should be. That doesn’t make it any less real or any less valuable. My heart has, happily, learned that being “real” includes finding authentic happiness in whatever shape the circumstances of my life give me.
On the other hand, grace in my heart does not necessarily equate with grace in my body. Just keeping it real….