I woke up this morning to find that both of my ankles had apparently convened an overnight meeting — without me — and decided to stage a slow-motion protest. Not painful, exactly. Just wrong. Not right, in that maddening way where you cannot even properly complain about it because there is no word for the sensation of joints that feel like they have been partially replaced with wet sand.
The knees held their own grievance session last night, especially on the stairs. And so here I am, making my best impression of a fully functional human being, having negotiated with my own body just to get to the coffee maker.
If you have ever thought to yourself, I did not sign up for this shit. Well, welcome. Pull up a chair. Mine is the one with the good armrests for getting up from.
I have been thinking about the blogger Julie Yip-Williams, who described her life body as the site of a vicious battle between Fortune and Misfortune, with herself as a “battered and bruised pawn in their violent games.” I read that and felt something click into place, the way a diagnosis does, not because it fixes anything, but because it ‘names’ the thing you have been stumbling around in the dark trying to describe.
Williams talked about mental paralysis. And I want to tell you, when your legs stop cooperating, paralysis is not just physical. It spreads. It settles into your mind with a cup of tea and makes itself comfortable. Every stair becomes a negotiation. Every walk becomes a calculation. You are not simply moving through the world anymore. You are managing a relationship with a body that has decided to become very high-maintenance. Ambiguity is the hardest part. Numbness and “not right” are often more taxing than acute pain, because you cannot even name the enemy clearly enough to fight it.
And here’s the humor: I can still drive. I can still do other things. The ankles are staging their protest, but they have not yet shut down the entire operation. This is the absurdity of living inside a body at war with itself. You are simultaneously a general and a casualty. Still driving. Still writing. Still drinking coffee.
I will be honest. Some mornings, I look up at the ceiling, and I am just done. I want God, irrespective of the shape God takes for you, though mine is not exactly the one from the pamphlets, to please wrap this up. I want God to say, “Okay, that’s enough, come on home.”
I am not going to dress this up; those thoughts are real. They are the honest voice of a spirit that is tired. There is a difference between wanting the struggle to end and wanting your life to end, and on the hardest mornings, it matters to know that difference. The desire for it to be finished is really a desire for peace. For the battle to pause. For the board to stop shifting under you for five minutes so you can remember what solid ground felt like.
I have talked before about the whole chessboard collapsing — about strategy becoming impossible when the pieces keep moving on you. When the board is collapsing, the only sane move is to stop staring at the endgame and just look at the next square. Today, my next square was coffee. Then the chair. Then these words. That is the whole plan. I am not asking for a winning position. I am asking for the next square, and then maybe the one after that.
It is not glamorous. Nobody is making a film about it. The trailer would be three minutes long, showing a man slowly getting out of a chair and riding his wheelchair, either to work or the pharmacy. But I think there is something genuinely holy in it. Mainly, it’s the refusal to disappear, even when everything in you is tired of showing up. Even when your ankles have filed the paperwork. Even when the spirit is bruised, and the knees are loud about it on the stairs.
So, this is what I know today. It is okay to be tired of being resilient. Resilience is exhausting, and nobody should have to pretend otherwise. You are allowed to look at the ceiling. You are allowed to be honest about the cost. And then, when you are ready, not because you must and not because someone needs you to perform, you look for the small lane. The next square. The thing that is still, however improbably, working.
Today, that is me. Still here. Ankles and all.
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Julie Yip-Williams wrote and fought and left behind a body of work that still finds people in the dark. I think she would understand a morning like this one. I think she would probably have had something sharp and funny to say about it, too. Here’s to her, and to everyone else navigating a body that has gone sideways — may your next square be a good one.