“The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

—

What can I say, except I am glad Andrea Gibson wrote the poems?

I am glad Andrea Gibson wrote the poems because of how close I have had to come to another person’s bones. In my first semester of medical school I had to peel the skin off a person once alive and count their bones and muscles and organs. I uncovered the unique way their vasculature branched and followed their nerves as they raced towards their brain. I counted the pits and missing parts and hardened arteries and medical devices; I hypothesized — as part of an assignment — how they died.

I am glad Andrea Gibson wrote poems because I feel that same burning inside my own bones. Knowing the names of the scaphoid, the lunate, the triquetral, and the pisiform isn’t nearly enough. You hold your breath when you explore your donor because there is a very large part of you that hopes they died peacefully in their sleep. As the teams around you make their discoveries — aneurysms, rotten bowel, heart attack, cancer — you begin to believe, just maybe, that it’s true.

As you learn to count the bones you learn another thing, too: most people do not.

I am glad Andrea Gibson wrote the poems because I learned to name the bones before I knew how to name my own traumas. I won’t try to name them here. The blog isn’t therapy; it’s about becoming grounded. But I have spent the better whole of my life refusing to name my traumas or even allow myself the thought that they are traumas.

As we learned the name the bones we also learned the real, physiological wear-and-tear that traumas have on the body. I was parsing apart another person’s body; in my own, I was trying to parse out the effects of abuses, illnesses, and traumas I myself endured.

I’ve started small. It is hard to look back on your life and name traumas you used to call normal; they’ve become a tangle of truths you’ve ignored and lies you’ve told yourself, and it’s hard to sort through them. I’ll work on that, certainly. For now, though, the task is simpler: name the traumas as they come, however small.

I am allowed to feel the weight of a semester spent standing in a room full of dead bodies, discovering cancers and kidney stones and bedsores.

I am allowed to cry if a patient dies.

I am allowed to feel the despair deep inside my bones when I meet a patient who is sick because someone wasn’t listening to their pain, who didn’t receive care due to the language they spoke or the color of their skin or the person that they love.

If I experience a traumatizing thing, I am allowed to just hold it, in my mouth or my chest or my hands.

I am learning to heal humans, and I am learning to heal myself. The poems teach me to listen to the fire inside my bones. I am glad — grateful, even — that anyone wrote the poems.

Photo on Foter.com