One busted big toe, and then another
I was in my bedroom, cutting my toenails, starting with baby toes, doing it with habitual muscle memory.
When I got to my left big toe I clipped from the outside in, left to right.
If you, too, have a dramatically curved big toenail, you understand that cutting it, where the nail curves down and cuts deeper into the flesh, requires extra care. You must clip a little deeper into the sidewall, a little more firmly and slowly.
Carelessly, I cut a little too deep. Immediately, I knew I’d gone too far, but knowing after the fact is knowing a moment too late.
Sure enough, as the nail grew out, it split and began digging itself into the flesh of my toe. Before long I developed a tiny, disproportionately painful problem. An ingrown toenail.
*
In the myth of Sisyphus, every day ends at the top of a mountain, watching the boulder he’d rolled uphill tumble and thunder back down to the valley.
Each new day he begins by digging his feet into the ground, wedging his shoulder into the boulder, then thrusting and shoving it back up towards the summit.
*
My left big toe hurt, a lot.
Yet, rather than deal with it sensibly, I embarked upon what can only be described as a five-week campaign of low-grade martyrdom.
I waited for selfhealing, soaking my toe, dressing it with ointment, bandaging it, walking carefully, skipping my more vigorous workouts, mostly reluctant to navigate a medical system outside of my own country.
*
Sisyphus’s daily task was an eternal punishment for defying the gods, for changing the natural order of death, for not listening.
*
22 years earlier, the same thing had happened after a pedicurist cut too deeply into the side of my toenail.
That time I misunderstood the doctor, thought removing part of the toenail meant I would be toenail-less forever, and proceeded to suffer for three months before learning that toenails, in fact, grow back, and I had endured all of that pain because I had misunderstood my options.
Apparently I am committed to learning certain lessons repeatedly.
*
Returning to this futile task day after day after day, Sisyphus toils, reaches the destination, then begins again.
*
Finally, after five weeks of pretending endurance was wisdom, I went to a podiatrist.
Using Google Translate, I explained the problem, and she tutted at me as she dug into my gnarly scabby toe, extracted a large shard of toenail, tidied up my other toes then pronounced me painfree. “Don’t wait so long to come in next time,” she lectured.
My toe was immediately better. After five weeks of unnecessary suffering and five weeks of mistaking avoidance for patience.
*
Albert Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Yes. One must. Sisyphus’ daily labour and repetition cannot only mean suffering.
But there are many ways to understand this myth.
I think one must also imagine Sisyphus seeks support when it’s available.
That Sisyphus just stops the suffering.
*
The next day, because life remains committed to irony and apparently loves symmetry, I was playing volleyball barefoot in the grass with friends when someone stomped directly on my other big toe. This time, I got a doctor to look at it right away. It bruised, I hobbled for three days, and then it was fine.
*
These experiences got me thinking about the ways we choose endurance over action when the action would require vulnerability, uncertainty, or admitting that we want something badly enough to pursue it.
How often do we tell ourselves we are being patient, practical, wise, or responsible, when really we are simply postponing the thing we know we want because beginning feels frightening?
How often do we live under our longing rather than pulling the longing into desire and action?
How often do we tolerate the ache of not beginning because the discomfort has become a familiar, satiating, and entirely unneccessary reality?
One must imagine Sisyphus makes better choices.
One must imagine I make better choices.
One must imagine you do too.
*
I see this all the time in my memoir-writing and healing students.
Most of them confess that they’ve carried the desire to write their stories for 15+ before finally beginning.
Sometimes the better part of a life.
They want to write. They ache to write. They know, somewhere deep in the body, that their stories want out.
That meaning-making is a healing process. That there is something in them asking to be witnessed, shaped, understood.
And yet they wait. Because it feels too huge and overwhelming to start, or complete.
Because writing a memoir asks us to face the great sprawling wilderness of a life and somehow shape it into story, and that can feel impossibly vulnerable.
Because sometimes we fear that beginning will change us.
And it will change us.
But so does postponing, delaying and suppressing. That has a cost too.
To deny a soul-level desire for years on end devours our life force energy.
You know deep down that some essential part of you remains unspoke, unrealized, unexpressed.
*
By the way, I told my friend about this pattern with my big toes and injuries, and I asked her to give me a shake if she saw me choosing endurance and suffering when I didn’t need to. She said yes. We can get our friends to do this for us.
*
So if you’ve been carrying the desire to write your memoir for years, if it’s one of those things you keep promising yourself you’ll get to when life is quieter, when work slows down, when you feel more ready, when you have more clarity, when, when, when…
Consider this your loving shake.
You don’t need to write your whole memoir this week.
You don’t need to have it all figured out before you begin.
You just need somewhere to start.
That is precisely why I’m teaching my workshop, Outline Your Memoir Using Fairy Tale and Myth as Your Guide, semi-regularly.
It’s the foundational workshop of my transformational memoir-writing and healing program, The Art of Personal Mythmaking, and inside it I’ll help you begin shaping the beautiful, unwieldy mass of your lived experience into something coherent, meaningful, and writable.
If writing your story has been living in your body, if it’s a desire you keep deferring, then let this be the moment you get unstuck, and start.
Click here to learn more about the workshop and sign up
xoxo,
Janelle
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