Hidden Parts Revealed
a rafting trip + chronic pain + courage
I’m forty-three years old and I’m riding a yellow school bus. This time my husband and kids are on the bus with me along with a collection of strangers in masks (it’s the year 2020, after all). We ride along the winding roads, canopies of trees embracing us around every corner but the beauty of North Carolina eludes me.
We’re about to take our kids whitewater rafting for the first time but silently I’m wondering if I’ve been foolish to put myself on this bus with no way to turn back. I’d been planning to stay behind because of my chronic health issues but I changed my mind at the last minute. I didn’t want to miss sharing this experience with my family.
By the time we arrive at our drop-off point, I’ve taken all of the medicines I can reasonably take and still the pain continues as we carry the raft to the start of our trip. We take our seats, put our lives in the hands of a young college girl, and push off from the shore.
An Underwater Childhood
I was a teenager the first time I went whitewater rafting with my uncle and cousins on the same river in North Carolina. I loved the experience so much that my uncle took me back the next day on a two person raft. A handful of years later my husband and I went down the same river on our honeymoon. It seems I return to this river every few decades but my connection to water began much earlier.
Growing up near the beach with two parents who loved the ocean, I became part amphibian from my toddler days onward. Scientists say that sixty percent of our body consists of water but I’d argue that growing up in Florida, my body contained higher levels due to the vast amount of time I spent submerged in a body of water. Practically everyone I knew had a backyard pool or at least access to a community pool, and the beach was only a short drive away (or even a short walk depending on which house I lived in at the time).
In my earliest years I lived beside a canal on the St. John’s river so my Dad could park his boat behind our house. An alligator named Big Sam liked to sunbathe on a rock opposite of our dock. Childhood also included lake trips and floating on a tube down the Ichetucknee river.
The smell of salt water, the sudden cessation of noises as my head went underwater, even the smell of most suntan lotions to this day produces an automatic sigh, a sudden release of tension in my body. The people I knew were happier by the water, with coconut oil slathered on their limbs, so water became a safe place. I’m grateful it was available in multitudes as a child and as a teenager.
Back to that Day in North Carolina
We’re allowed to take our masks off as we exit the bus and by the time we’re on the river, my senses light up. I listen to the raft slapping against the waves, smell the suntan lotion and see the beauty of North Carolina that’s no longer deniable by my anxious brain. After six months of lockdown in our house, fresh air filters through our pores as we paddle down the river.
I expect the beauty and joy of being on the water but I don’t anticipate what happens in my body. For the next two hours I don’t feel any pain or any of the other symptoms that go along with my condition. The only explanation is that I’ve found my way back to the aquatic safe-haven of my childhood and my body knows it. For the next two hours, I’m free.
The experience unlocks something inside of me. I spend the rest of the trip taking risks, daring my pain to stop me. With two days left in North Carolina we float on tubes down a river and then paddle board for the first time. I still have to keep up with my medicines and when the trip is over my pain is not cured but something inside of me has changed.
Living Beyond Limitations
It cost me a lot the day that I got on that school bus with no way to back out, consumed with the fear that I would be miserable for the next two hours and possibly ruin my family’s trip. In the few years prior to the trip, between my pain condition and the pandemic, life had become small and I had become small along with it. Or maybe I became small first and then life shrunk around me. However it happened, limitations defined my life.
The desire to share an experience with my kids, an experience that had been important to me when I was their age, pushed me onto the bus that day. I longed to live an abundant life beyond my current limitations.
My body’s response for those two hours and during the other activities we did together on that trip, taught me I didn’t know everything there was to know about myself. Yes, I was still Aimee-the-chronic-pain-patient-with-anxiety.
And.
And I was also Aimee-who-had-courage, Aimee-the-whitewater-rafter, Aimee-the-paddle-boarder. If these parts were hidden and now revealed what other parts could show up any day, I wondered. As my identity expanded, the box I lived in shifted as well. Maybe I also have to the courage to face the pain of this pandemic. Maybe I also have creative gifts worth sharing with others.
I could feel the walls around my life widen out a little further with each new courageous thought.
Is there a time in your life when you experienced an expansion of your identity, a widening of your world?
Continue the Journey
Still-a new documentary about Michael J Fox, from his early days of fame through decades of living with Parkinson’s disease. As a child of the 80’s, I watched Family Ties weekly and saw Back to the Future and Teen Wolf in the theater. Fox’s voice and mannerisms blend into my childhood and adolescent memories. I remember when his diagnosis became national news. In this film I appreciated his willingness to show the world some of his greatest highs and lowest lows.
And even though my experience with a body that chooses its own course is nothing like what he has had to endure, there is a familiarity of pain and struggle that I connected to as well as the determination to show up each day, not knowing fully what the day might bring.
“I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.”
-Michael J Fox
Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee
Thanks for reading, Linda. I love that you also got kayaks. We’ve already taken them out several times in the last week. The big moment this week was when I took them out with my daughter and successfully loaded and secured them back on top of my car.
Being on the water has such a powerful effect, doesn’t it? Thanks for sharing. And my husband and I just bought kayaks too...for our 35th anniversary!