Bent

Christopher Lloyd

In her famous essay “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss writes that “The sensations of my own body may be the only subject on which I am qualified to claim expertise. Sad and terrible, then, how little I know.” That corporeal un/knowing is central to Biss’ argument about the paucity of ways we have for describing and understanding our experiences of pain. I seem to be able to write this essay only when I am in pain, either physical or psychic. When I am not conscious of my back—which is not often, it’s true—I do not think to write more of this essay. Put another way, the pressures of my body become the pressures of my writing, and when I feel the former, the latter exerts itself. If I feel spinal tension, it seems, I feel that it might be worth trying to transform it into words. Yet, as Biss points out, it is so hard to describe one’s own experience of pain, to make sense of it, or to make it sensible to others. 

The pain I am talking about relates to my back. I have kyphosis, a curvature of the spine that makes one look hunched over, the name coming from kyphos, meaning hump. Hunchback is a more regularly but derogatorily used term that makes me slump into my chair. It is unclear when the kyphosis emerged—it is likely congenital—but it was only spotted by doctors in my late teens. 

There are times that I would like my body to simply vanish. 

On a clear bright day, I fell about twenty or so feet from the rock face of a cliff onto the stony beach below. I was making an art project for my A-Level coursework: filming the sea and my two friends on the shoreline below. (Yes, it was going to be as pretentious as it sounds). As I made my climb down—the cliff was sedimentary, like an irregular staircase, full of ledges and footholds, so I did not think anything of it—I grabbed a chunk of stone and it came loose in my hand. It just broke off. I remember this moment vividly as I suddenly fell backwards, suspended in the air like a Looney Tunes character. 

I then blacked out (thankfully). When I came to, I was on the rocks, screaming in pain. I think I was swearing like a sailor who hadn’t seen land in years. A man I did not know was holding me in place, saying don’t move don’t move it will be ok, and eventually an air ambulance arrived. The two friends I was with were hysterical, or so they told me afterwards, unsure if I was going to live. Below me, they saw the whole thing, my quick flight down. I still apologize for frightening them. (The one friend even broke down on her drive home; a terrible day). I blacked out a second time as I was carried into the air ambulance. The medic, apparently, was sexy, or so says my one friend; a detail that she knew would put a smile on my face afterwards, even if I missed him.

Once I got to the nearest hospital, they cut open my favourite clothes and did a few x-rays. They did not do a CT scan on my head, which is customary and expected. They missed the near-fatal blood clot pressing upon my brain that gave me headaches for months (another kind of pain), but they did enough scans of my bones to check for breakage. As the technicians were trying to take the images, though, they had to move and reorient me. It was difficult to get good and clear shots. We went again and again. It transpired that my spine was interfering with their work. Only on coming back to the main ward and waiting for the doctor to look at the results were two things made clear: the fall had fractured a number of vertebrae (only—only!—internally, they said) which would heal on their own; and I had kyphosis, probably since birth. 

I know that my asthma is likely exacerbated by the shape of my skeleton.

As scholar and poet Travis Chi Wing Lau writes in “The Crip Poetics of Pain,” “X-rays and MRIs made knowledge of [his] body—the shadowy unknowable finally exposed to the light of the clinical gaze. The result was a series of spectral images revealing undeniable spinal deformity, growth gone wrong. The ease with which revelation slides into correction felt perverse: its presumed obviousness, its unquestionability, its speed in reducing [him] to a therapeutic object”. It was the clinical tests and imaging that enabled Lau to see himself and his scoliosis through a particular visual lens, the medicalised one that fixed his pain and body as definable and diagnosable. Where his pain was, before that, felt but not noted, the x-rays gave visibility to the intangible. 

For me, the x-rays and their results did not just tell me something about the accident I’d had, but also about the spine I had been living with for almost two decades. When we—me, my parents—were surprised about this diagnosis, the doctor was infuriated. At least, he was furious with them, I did not see this conversation (or if I did, I repressed it). The doctor was shocked that they had not noticed my spinal issues before now, were oblivious to my distortions. To be fair, so was I. Or, again, perhaps I knew that there was something different in the mirror but I could not face looking at it face-on. 

I do not want to linger much on this “failed” parental diagnosis, as the doctors saw it. Rather, I am more interested in this belatedness, the sense of seeing myself anew. This knowledge was only ushered in because of the accident, and as such I wonder what I would think about my spine now had none of this occurred. Would I still be oblivious to my curves? Would I write off the pain as just the sensation of living in this bag of flesh we call being human? 

I can barely look at myself in mirrors from the side or the back anymore. From the front, I am fine, sometimes even like what I see. I’ve taken shirtless photos, what queer man hasn’t? But as soon as I turn, offer a profile, I lose my nerve. I want to cry. Catching glimpses of it in the gym’s relentless mirrors makes my stomach flip. Suddenly everything shifts and my body is an alien landscape, a shape that I cannot quite feel when I am just moving around. Seeing is believing, in a way. My mirror image, my mirror-stage, is revived daily as a case of mistaken identity; this cannot be me, is not me, but must be, and as such is rejected.

I want to come back to the other pain I experienced after my fall. Following a week of relentless headaches, I visited a larger hospital near my home, and they (finally) did CT scans that revealed a crack along one of the skull sutures. (These sutures come together when you are a baby, so it was like I had reversed part of that developmental process). When I hit the rocks, a small piece of skull chipped off and lodged itself beneath the bone, pressing upon the membranes and causing a large blood clot to develop. The clot in turn pressed upon my brain causing the headaches, or what I should probably call migraines (I tend to underplay these things so as not to sound dramatic). The pain meant that I could barely watch television or read books—my main teenage pastimes—and instead I spent a lot of time laying in silence, listening to daytime tv (a strange activity), or getting into audiobooks. When you switch suddenly from an ocular to a solely aural way of experiencing the world you feel very disordered. 

The doctors said they could drill into my skull to siphon the blood out, or we could just leave it to absorb back into the body. They, we, opted for the latter, even if that meant enduring not only the spinal pain but also the cranial pain, and—less seriously—missing all of my A-Level final assessments. I was not too mad about the latter, though it did add an anticlimactic flourish to the end of my school education. I had high hopes for the art project that never came to be.

Taking my shirt off in front of a guy is so often uncomfortable.

In time, after various doctors’ appointments and years at university, the spinal pain began to re-assert itself with some force. Again, the language to describe this pain, as Biss writes, fails us. It is largely dull and diffuse, rather than sharp and singular. Instead of stabbing or shooting pain, it is like a thick and ambient ache—everywhere and nowhere, no clear edges, no beginning or end. You know when you have that pain from a twisted nerve or from slicing a finger with a kitchen knife? It’s sudden, precise, locatable. This is a whole other world of sensation. As Biss argues, pain scales (like 1-10) measure “only the intensity of pain, not the duration. This may be its greatest flaw. A measure of pain, I believe, requires at least two dimensions. The suffering of Hell is terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.” Feeling pained exists in both space and time, as all bodies are, really. That geography is, to some of us, a shifting terrain. 

I was able to see an NHS physiotherapist when I moved out of London, after much nervousness. It felt as though going to one would both confirm my bodily irregularity and lend legitimacy to the pain I was feeling, in turn making that pain more feelable. The physio that I saw was a short and severe-looking woman, dark hair pulled back from her face. At first, she seemed not to be interested in my self-descriptions—my spine is curved, I sometimes have discomfort from it—until, of course, she asked me to take off my shirt. When she saw my spine, it registered on her face and in her body. It was like she was taken aback, which made me want to fall into the ground right there and then. I was hot, shaky. She did a brief examination of my back and then said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, “you have a deformity, you are deformed.” I don’t think that English was this woman’s first language so I am not holding her in too much disregard, but the word itself—deformed—implied that something had gone wrong with my making. My form was off. Or, even, that I was once formed correctly, and then something went wrong. If I had not been in her physio room, surrounded by other patients in their own curtained cubicles, I would have burst into tears. But I also thought that this woman would not take kindly to tears. She seemed hardened to them. (I cried on the way home instead).

I can see stretch marks on my back where the skin is slowly changing.

The deformity that she named is one that I cannot but attach to my queerness, as though they are both names for one-another. Like the ideas are in cahoots. Which came first, my curvature or my queerness? They’re like a moebius strip—they feel moebial (not an adjective, but it should be). By calling attention to the way that my back was altered, it felt as though she—standing in for society, as institutionalised figures so often do—was redescribing my queerness back to me. Look, she seemed to say, you are distorted, deformed. There is nothing we can do about it. Indeed, there is little to be done about my back, which I’ll return to.

I tried writing about this clinical moment, indirectly and in a different context, in a short story called “Deformation.” I transposed some of the pain of injury to the pain of BDSM, as though making explicit to myself or others that the worlds of the nonnormative body and nonnormative sex were one and the same (which I guess they always are). Lau, too, writes through and into his pain, in poetry and criticism. In the poems, Lau began to use the forward slash in his lines to mark “where pain interrupted or arrived upon the scene of writing.” A “/” is commonly used in literary critical writing to indicate the end of a poem’s line or stanza, and many contemporary poets bring the slash into poem itself to mark certain kinds of break or pause or pre-linguistic element. Now Lau uses the slash within the works to “witness” his pain not simply as a subject of writing, but a constituent part of it. I love the way that Lau’s slashes can indicate, but not always account for, spinal pain. There is something evocative about indexing pain without attempting to make meaning from it. 

I am writing this now to try and understand my own body. I have written the story, mentioned above, as well as poems about it. No doubt I will continue to do so. Yet today, as I type, I am more consumed than anything by the pain that my kyphosis can bring, both as it courses up and down my back (sometimes barely, sometimes forcefully) as well as the strange sense of self it has ushed in. 

These are lines that I do not know what to do with. Like I do not know what to do with my body. The physio recommended some daily stretches, but generally her advice was to do a gym and yoga workout every day. Both gym and yoga, daily. I cannot manage this, bodily or temporally, so I split my week into three days of each. I hope that it is enough, it has to be. The only thing we can do at this point, the physio said, was to stop the spine from getting worse. There is no going back: we cannot make it better. We can only halt the slow declension. The famous LGBTQ+ phrase, it gets better, rings hollow. 

When describing these kyphotic problems with my therapist, he said “your spine holds you up, literally.” To look after one’s spine, he suggested, is to hold oneself, to provide care, to repair wounds. Attending to my spine, I have my own back, as it were. It is a form of self-nourishment (I avoid “self-care” here). As I do my yogic spinal flexions and downward dogs, add weight to my lat-pulls, and slide my arms up the wall like a piece of performance art, I sink further and further into my strange embodiment.

There is nothing clear, to me, about this cluster of feelings and pain-points. I have to confront the body I inhabit and learn to like, if not love, it. I have to take care of myself in ways that no-one else can. I have to attend to my specificity, my differences, my own particular needs. And I have to try not to give in to the darker feelings of shame and embarrassment and fear and ostracism and alterity.

I am bent, born this way.