What I Could Not Fix in Myself by Melissa Lewis-Ackerman

By age forty-five my vertebrae were in full revolt.  The revolt sent continual shocks of pain through my right shoulder and up my neck.  I’d endured years of MRI’s, CT-SCANS, oral medications, steroid injections, and foreigners’ praying over my body in languages I didn’t understand.  Twice there was tea involved, and I cringe to add, awkward dancing.

I’d seriously considered leaving the country.  Life and job be damned.  I’d move to India, eat nothing but rice, sleep on my yoga mat, and do menial labor in silence.  I’d find a Shaman to fix in me what I could not fix in myself.

As a last resort I decided to spend three months at a wellness center in Los Angeles.  Holistic Central promised a rotation of Feldenkrais, massage and physical therapy were keys to living pain free.

Meeting my physical therapist Ryan for the first time terrified me.  Handsome and sophisticated in his early sixties, Ryan’s uncertain, dark eyes stalled an eternity, absorbing everything they landed on.  –He was vulnerable and earnest.  –Not a wise-ass jock.

The first shiver of terror moved through me as Ryan closed his office door.  Pride wouldn’t allow my asking, “Could we just leave the door open, please?”

It was better for me to let nervous, fucked up me hang out until male healthcare providers became so uncomfortable in my presence they’d reopen doors to sooth themselves, offering something like, “Hey, are you a little warm?  I’m a little warm.  Maybe we can use some air in here.”

Sitting across from Ryan in my rotating desk chair with nervous me on full tilt, my knees bobbed and swiveled left and right like a sideways jackhammer.  If Ryan noticed my antics he didn’t show concern as he started a chart for me in low lamp light.

From the deep end of his rectangular, mood-set office my eyes moved circles around the space searching for stretch bands and weights that assist physical therapy.  None were visible.  Blankets and pillows were stacked on a deep shelf.  File cabinets, and tall bookcases took up most of the wall space.  A massage bed dominated the center of the room.

Extra anxiety kicked in with the realization of the missing apparati, causing me to grip and tear at my right shoulder as whipping doses of hostile electricity surged through it.

Even with the surge, I knew I wouldn’t bolt from Ryan’s office.  I had no choice but to see what Ryan could offer in the way of healing, because… well… what else could I do if I wasn’t ready to pack it all in for India?

Ryan asked a lot of questions about my physical self that caused my having to open up about early life body trauma inflicted by my violent, dead mother.  I was troubled by Ryan’s tenderly wielded power to have me lay myself bare.  I’d never divulged such private matters outside a therapists office, and I didn’t divulge much there.  After twenty-five years of therapy I was tired of my story.  The last decade had been one continuous, Alice in Wonderland type tea party, with my being Alice in the blue dress, frustrated with the latest mad hatter seated at the head of the table, dismayed by the rabbit clutching his pocket watch, confounded by time.  It’s a wonder I’ve never been confined to a hospital.

Ryan set my chart aside before turning his chair toward mine.  With sixteen inches between our knees paranoia churned my stomach into a boiling cauldron.  On some level I was certain every healthcare provider wasn’t about to rape me, but my body wouldn’t give any male the benefit of the doubt.

“Your MRI and CT-SCAN are basically clear.  Any natural degeneration in your vertebrae isn’t enough to cause the symptoms your exhibiting.  You say you can’t sleep.  –That you can’t sit for any length of time without pain?  And…”

“It’s the movement,” I rushed.  “At night, I mean.  If I fall asleep, but then shift at all in bed the pain shoots through my shoulder and up the side of my neck.  But there’s always a nagging ache in my shoulder close to my spine even when I don’t shift.  And if I sit too long, like in a theatre seat, I start feeling a tingling move up from the center of my spine to the aching place in my shoulder.  Then I start pulling at my neck and shoulder for relief that doesn’t come.  The only time I feel good in my body is first thing in the morning standing in a hot shower.”

“Give me a number for the pain.  On a scale from one to ten.”

“Bedtime, seven through nine.  Sitting, begins at four and ends up at eleven with a fantastic dose of depression tacked on.  Standing in the shower can be a two.  But I’m never at a zero or one.”

He took up my chart, scribbling notes before turning back again.  “You’ve had no accidents to bring on your condition.  You say you’ve tried countless methods of recovery including strength training to overcome what you now feel is simply a profound weakness in your upper right back.”

“Yes,” I said, adding, “And I hope by the time I head back to New York in three months you and your team will have some idea about how to help me.”

“It could be trauma from the early life violence is trapped in your body.  In your muscles,” he offered.

“I don’t see it,” I said.  He waited moments like he hoped I’d give it more thought.  When I didn’t he gave me the most connected, knowing expression I’ve ever seen reflected back into my own face.  There’s some kind of kinship in the air.  I can almost touch it.  Wounded me wants to scream, “Hey, we’re not friends!  –What the fuck are you doing?”

Instead I asked with deep concern, “Why don’t you have exercise equipment?  Stretch bands?  This is physical therapy, right?”

“This is a lot of things.  There’s a gym just down the hall.  –Why don’t you recognize it, Melissa?  That it could be past trauma trapped in your muscles?  Why, you’re trembling out of your chair just sitting here.”

“I let all that go years ago,” I said, flatly, ignoring his acknowledgement of my behaviors that are supposed to be private.  –I mean, everyone knows if Aunt Martha’s picking lint off the carpet for hours and won’t get off her knees, you just walk around her.  It’s the polite thing to do.

“But maybe your body hasn’t let it all go,” Ryan suggested with a deadpan expression that frightened me at the same time his respectful, boundary-less way of dealing with me was beginning to give me something akin to hope for my situation.

A gratefulness toward Ryan stirred places in me I couldn’t tamp down.  I hated it.  Wounded me had a long raging war with grateful me.  Grateful me is dangerous to our person.  Grateful me forced us to submit as Ryan rolled his chair closer to ours.  Feeling the new, three inch gap between the two of us I realized Ryan was never going to open his office door, and grateful me wasn’t going to make him.

When Ryan sat that close I couldn’t see him as a whole person.  He was random bursts of images being spit from a Polaroid camera.  His tight muscled arms bulged against the sleeves of his too white Polo.  There was a smudge on the left thigh of his light colored khakis.  His glasses were sparkling silver, wire frames.  His right shoe was made of expensive worn leather.  Something was breaking… but I couldn’t tell if the breaking was something inside or outside of me.

“I don’t know,” I stammered, pressing my palms over my dancing knees.  My mind was a repetitive mantra of, “Sure, you can get the fuck out of this room and never come back, Melissa, but if you’re not willing to face yourself at forty-five, just when in hell are you going to do it?

I hate over dramatic me.

I got a blue gown.  I let my dark hair fall from its tidy bun as I laid back on the warm padded massage table with the soft green covering.  There were blankets involved.  Soft classical filled the air.

Avoiding eye contact with Ryan it took a while for me to finally ask, “What should I do while you’re doing what you’re doing?”

He’d pulled a tall stool up-close to the table, sitting, working his hands over the top of my gown to massage and relax my right shoulder.  A heat formed in the room that made it hard for me to pull air in and out of my lungs.  My solar plexus was a tight, vibrating machine.

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“I’m afraid of how you’re touching me,” I said.  “I have all this anxiety.  How do I act?”

“Oh.  I see.  You breathe.  Then you tell me when you can’t stand my touching you anymore, and I stop.”

§

I’d never heard of Feldenkrais when I began at Holistic Central.

Mostly I learned not to kill the Walnut Family.

“They live under the arch of your foot,” Myra, my Feldenkrais practitioner, said.  Myra had the voice of my first grade teacher.  “Two tiny parents, a kid, with another one on the way.  They don’t need a mansion, just a comfortable space between a mansion and a tight, New York City apartment.  The size of a Walnut.”

Elegantly dressed Myra wearing slacks and a colorful silk blouse got down on all fours prodding me to loosen my ankles and relax my toes.  My low back pain dissipated immediately with these simple cues for release.  She’d widened my knees with a gentle tap to each inside and asked me to stop tucking my tail bone under.  Not an easy task after a couple of decades of yoga practice teaching me the contrary.

Knowing the Walnut family lived beneath my arches, that they needed my arch, weighed heavy.  I imagined a pretty, brunette, stay-at-home mom, an architect father, and screaming red-headed preschooler, all unknowing their fates lay in my corrected posture.

I’d alternate walking to the office door, then back to Myra for realignment through a maze created by foam cushions, blankets, and a massage table placed in the center of the room.  A twisting in my gut like the turning of a key occurred each time I turned back toward Myra.  She was a nice enough thirty-something with striking, blue eyes, long, auburn hair, and a pretty face.  But I sensed something tough about her, neatly hidden.  I found myself deeply concerned about whether she liked me or not.

“How does it feel to walk after the alignments?” She asked.

“Less pain,” I said.

“Good.  We can build on that.”

§

Meeting my massage therapist, Bea was easier all around.  Her face was a little kid’s on Christmas morning in a Norman Rockwell painting.  A bloom of pretty light, with smiling green eyes and pinkish-blonde hair.  She radiated something good that was true.

I didn’t give Bea the finer points, but I’d had a massage once in my thirties.  I cried sitting in my car in the parking lot after, and spent the next three days so angry I could’ve bulldozed a small neighborhood with my rage.  I felt I’d been raped.

“You’ve only had a massage once?  Wow,” Bea said, with an innate excitement and air of innocence that left me feeling she was on permanent, psychological holiday.

I lay on a heated table covered in blankets with my face stuck in a donut shaped apparatus.  –Nude, but for my silky black thong, having worn it forgetting I’d have to get almost naked for the massage.

My subconscious avoidance/denial of the depth of what I’d committed myself to at Holistic Central had been particularly strong when I woke up happy on massage day.  Getting out of bed it was theoretically possible that I was a person getting a massage in few hours, but not really.   I got up playing Mozart, working on an essay, drinking coffee.  It was high times for me until the alarm on my phone went off reminding me it was time to drive to the appointment.

“Yes,” I said, “That was a long time ago.”

As the massage began I didn’t tell Bea that her smart, intuitive touch that was giving me release and comfort in my spine was also making me feel pretty suicidal.  Something in touching made me want to scream for everything in the world to just stop so I could get my bearing.  So consumed by urgent sorrow, I knew if I allowed myself to truly feel all that was happening to me, and all that had happened to me, I’d have to hit my knees, plant my face against cold concrete, and cry my eyes out.

Fighting for the stability of my mental life I desperately tried to remember that I’d picked to be there.  –To have fixed in me, what I could not fix in myself.

§

“What’s the wedge for?”  I asked, Myra Felden.

Myra was still nice enough after a few Feldenkrais sessions, though I had some anxiety about her being physically larger than myself, and the compulsion I’d had to be liked by Myra had grown with ferocity.  It followed me into each meeting until I convinced myself that Myra Feldon didn’t like me at all.

My need for powerful women to be on-my-side, to like me, and then my being convinced they didn’t like me, that they’d never be on-my-side, wasn’t uncommon.  Each time this relationship dynamic formed for me in some capacity, like say, with a new friend, I’d land in a Tea Party session discussing what WAR I needed these women on-my-side for, and just why in hell I needed them to like me anyway.

“I’m going to help you lie back on the table with your legs up on the wedge.”  Myra’s voice was that of my first grade teacher again.  And though I’d generally felt either rejection or reward in the changing tone of Myra’s voice, in that instant I flat-out resented her.

“I thought you were teaching me to be in my skeleton.  The walking, the sitting, my posture problems, you know,” I whined, adding, “Saving the Walnut family.”

A radiant smile washed over her face, competing with a stern quality behind her eyes that bothered me.  I didn’t think I’d be able to take Myra in a dark alley.

“I am.  I’m teaching you to breath, to relax, to slow down, to have body awareness.  Part of it means lying back on this table with your legs up on a wedge.”  She pointed at the wedge in an obvious way, like, ‘don’t imagine for a moment this isn’t about to happen.’

I climbed up on the table.

“I’m just going to adjust your limbs on the wedge.  I’ll talk you through it,” she said.

Myra held my right leg in her hands, working the leg against its socket before setting it back down just so on the wedge.

“Which leg feels heavier?”

“The left.”

“Which leg feels lighter?”

“The right.”

“Which leg feels longer?”

“God, I swear to you, I don’t fucking know,” I said, depleted by the sheer energy it took to remain in the room.

“Good answer and good awareness,” Myra Feldon said, and I noticed that her smile was different.  It bathed me in sunshine.  I’d participated.  I was being extra rewarded.  Like a little kid I clung to the rush of warmth that pervaded her beautiful eyes.  I was just fine being flat on my back on the table as she moved to my left leg and began singing songs about relaxing that cracked me up.  Myra talked to my muscles, begging them to get happy and loose again.  There was an unnatural, childlike quality to my delight until she reached my right shoulder.

Fucking bitch!  I felt suicidal again.  –Metal scrapped metal in my brain.

Myra’s hands froze on my shoulder, “Breathe, Mel.  Give me a good, Shoo-wahhhh… as you breathe out.  Relax your jaw.  Come on.  Shoo-wahhhhh.”

“I don’t wanna, and I’m not gonna,” I said, through gritted teeth, enjoying my defiance.

“Why not?”

“Because I feel stupid doing it.  That’s why!”

Myra began to shoo-wahhhh… in an exaggerated fashion, while simultaneously beginning to move my shoulder again.  “Do I look stupid, shoo-wahhhhing, Mel?”

“Yes, actually, I’m sorry to report that you do,” I said, but I was lying.  Myra looked even more stunning fearlessly exposed.

At the end of the session…

“Do you want to tell me what’s up with the shoulder?”

“It’s fine.  I’m going to be fine,” I said, visibly suffering, pressing my fingertips into my stomach, bracing myself from some invisible thing.

“Well, you’re right.  You’re going to be fine, but if you’re not fine in this particular moment, it’s okay to say so. You should always say when touch disturbs you.”

Are you fucking kidding me, I thought, but only said, “You don’t get it.  I’m going to keep coming here, allowing myself to be touched whether it disturbs me or not until I destroy what has me.”

With these words she moved to the left and safer side of my body again.  Saddened, deeply depressed, I realized then that something about Myra Felden made me feel connected to my monstrous, dead mother, who was built like a Texas linebacker.

Mother was big.  I was small!

“So, you’re holding something in your shoulder.  No biggie.  In my line of work I see this all the time.  Do you want to be free of it, though?  I mean really free!”

I loved the sound of her voice then.  The shift in power excited me.  She knew in an instant I wasn’t really the mouse that slipped into her office each week.  “Yes,” I said.  “Yes, I do.”

“Then you have to connect with it, whatever it is, so you can let it go.  You won’t destroy it.  You won’t beat it back.  You won’t force your freedom.  And, I’m deeply sorry about that.”

I didn’t say a word.  I wasn’t going to thank her for stating the god-damn obvious.

§

Ryan asked, “So what’s your life like?  New York?  Why’d you come all the way to LA to get healed?”

I wanted to say that I only moved to New York recently from LA.  That I hate New York, but he moved from the left side of my body to the right.  Standing above the bed and my head, Ryan slipped his fingers beneath my gown taking solid hold of my right shoulder, massaging, working it away from my spine where he explained it’s been glued for years.  The quiet that swept through me was dense.  Launched into a different sphere I had to work hard to stay somewhere between my body on the table and the low ceiling.

“Do you enjoy being a writer, a professor?” he asked.

“I can’t think about it.  I can’t,” I said, in a voice so distorted it didn’t sound like mine.  I pressed my free hand hard over my face, so he couldn’t see what was happening to me.  My mind was a repetitive, soundless scream, ‘I’m afraid if you don’t stop touching me, I’m going to either kill myself, or bring you into this world with me!’

“Is it time to stop?” he asked.  “Do you want to tell me what happened to the shoulder?”

“No!  Ignore me!  I want to break this!” I shouted.

Ryan stopped without removing his hands from under my gown.  The warmth of inches of skin on skin was delicious while I simultaneously needed to vomit.  Images of an overcast sky overwhelming a stone garden came to mind in flashes.  Barefoot, wearing a feeble white gown, I collected colorless rocks on a colorless path, trying not to hit my knees, to beg my release for a thousand years.

“Uncover your face.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re nice to me.  I don’t know.  I don’t want you to see me!”

“But what if I want to see you.  What if your vulnerability is the most beautiful thing about you?”

I cried beneath my hand.  He took his own hands out from under my gown.  He lingered, waiting for me to settle, before leaving the room.

§

After a bit I didn’t feel suicidal when Bea touched me.  I felt like a regular person getting a massage, which made me feel very grown up.  She showed me a poster of all the muscles in the body, pointing to ones in my shoulder and neck, giving me her own theories about my chronic pain that had become remarkably subdued with my work at the Center.  By week eight I was thinking, breathing, sitting, standing, laying down, and moving altogether differently.  Not totally free of what had me yet, but there was new life for me and hope.

“These two muscles are playing tug-a-war in your shoulder,” Bea said.  “We need them to get along.  This causes the pull in your neck you’ve had for years.”  She grinned so broadly that I grinned back.  What else can a person do in the presence of such earnestness and warmth?

But I did grow concerned when I realized how small the muscles in my back and neck were.  My shoulder was jacked up almost to my ear some days.  I carried my whole self in my shoulder.  If those muscles ever gave, I’d be screwed.

§

Myra Felden surprised me during one session by having her laptop out.  “I want you to watch something, Mel.  Are you up for a short video?”  She asked.

“Sure,” I said, because I’d come to trust her.  We’d had a “come-to-Jesus” moment in a prior session.

“Who comes to mind when you look at me?  You react to me, Mel,” Myra asked.  “Sometimes you hate me.  Sometimes you love me.  I’ve known you too short a time for these shifts to be about me.”

I’d wanted to say Myra was being dramatic, but dropped the crap.  “My mother.  You remind me of my mother.  And my mother hated me.”

“Why’d she hate you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  She sniffed out my weaknesses early.  –I’d never be powerful or cunning like her.  I’d certainly never grow to be the voluptuous, beautiful woman she was.  But what she hated most, I think, was looking into my face and seeing a constant dismay.  She was disgusted by the way I couldn’t hate her, no matter what she did to me.  She tried so many times to slap all that was me out of my face until she finally ruptured my ear drum.”

“Those were different times,” Myra said, like she really understood that they were, and then added after a long pause. “Well, I’m both sorry and glad I remind you of your mother.  Sorry, because it’s so painful to face old demons.   Glad, because I believe every time we face our demons we get a little bit of ourselves back in the process.”

Myra checked the volume on her laptop, waiting for me to get settled on the table. She had me watch the Brené Brown video, The Power of Vulnerability.

Before frequenting the Center I hadn’t thought much about what vulnerability brought to human experience.  The word’s overused, like the word love is overused, to the point where you hear it but it has no meaning.  Listening to Brené Brown had me feeling like it could be brave and cool to be vulnerable and let other people see me be vulnerable.  It made me think about how I didn’t want to be forty-six having not ever felt worthy of witness.

§

After a time, Ryan didn’t scare me like most men did.

All my life I’ve walked city streets with my face tilted toward the ground.

I fear the look in men’s eyes that says they’d turn on me in a minute.  I have a series of bolts on my apartment door when I reside in an already secured building.  I’m terrified of fire escapes, and wish heartily the windows they lead to were bricked over.  Cab drivers cause a level of paranoia in me that’s embarrassing, over whether I’ll be allowed to make my destinations.

Ryan didn’t scare me anymore like most men did.  I didn’t flinch from his touch when he helped me onto his table.  Something had snapped in my low back just before my last afternoon appointment.  The muscles in my right buttock squealed and knotted.  Ryan pulled my pants down just enough to knead the top of my buttock.  I gripped the edges of the table so tightly my knuckles turned white.

“Is this okay?”  He asked.

“Do I have a choice to care?”

“Not really,” he laughed, as something in my buttock shifted back into place, releasing me from debilitating torture.  “Roll over.  Let’s get a look at the neck and shoulder.”

When Ryan touched my shoulder I grabbed my head with my free hand, pressing my palm over my eyes in the way that’d become natural, but I didn’t feel like I was being catapulted anywhere.  I’d begun staying inside my body on the table.

Depression still fell over me in waves though when Ryan hit a particular spot where my neck connected to my right side shoulder.

“Should I stop?”

“No!”  I yelled, “I have to beat this thing.”

“Identify the thing.”

“You know the thing!  I can’t be touched, and when you get near a certain part of my neck and shoulder I feel physically ill!”  I was embarrassed by the hatful sound in my voice.

“It’s leaving you.  What’s had you,” he said.  “Your shoulder was locked to your spine when you came here.  Zero movement.  It’s starting to move.”

“But you don’t know for sure if what has me will release me completely, do you?!”

He put one hand over mine, pulling it from my face, looking into my eyes from above.  “Even if we can’t get it all before you go back to New York, you have to know, what has you is leaving.  I feel it.  It will never have you like it had you before.”

I force my hand back over my eyes, “Just break it.  And, don’t be nice to me.  It makes me nuts!”

“Sure,” he said, ruffling my hair, before slipping his hands back under my gown at my neck, getting at my shoulder again.  “Tell me a story then.  You’re the writer.  Take us far away from here.”

“I knew a girl who hid in a closet,” I said, through gritted teeth, as Ryan probed the muscle that made me most upset.

“Why’d she hide in a closet?”

“She was afraid of her mother.”

“Did her mother wreck her shoulder?”

“No, the mother bashed her head into walls as a fine, good morning.”

“Oh.  I had a father who made me feel like this girl must have felt.  But did this girl have a shoulder issue too?”

“Yes, she did, but her jammed shoulder came from a burly man who knew the mother wouldn’t care what happened to her.”

“I see.  Tell me more.”

“Well, I bet if the burly man knew the girl would spend years held captive by something as stupid as a shoulder, he would’ve probably gone off to some bar and found an age appropriate woman to spend the night with.”

“Does she really believe that?  That the burly man would’ve made a different choice if he’d known what pain he’d cause the girl in her future?”

“She has to believe it,” I said.  “It’s what keeps her sane.”

“You know what I think?  I think it doesn’t matter what choice the burly man would’ve made.  I think all that matters is that this girl admit to herself that the burly man did this fucked up thing, so she can get him out of her system!”

I didn’t respond.

“Take your hand from your face,” he said, just as I felt this zig-zagging thread of electricity that started above my collar bone, moving all the way over my shoulder socket, and half way down my right arm.  My shoulder lowered a centimeter or two down away from my ear, resting deeper on the table.

I opened my eyes, looking up at him.  Pools of brown.  Endless something.  It seemed like forever before I asked, “How long do I have to be vulnerable like this?”

“You decide,” he said.  I shifted my eyes to a shelf full of linens.

“Have a good flight,” he said, taking up my chart, leaving me to get changed.

Melissa Lewis-Ackerman has an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. She’s received two Pushcart Nominations, and she’s published with the Eckleburg Review, ECLECTICA, Compose, Claudius Speaks, and various other spaces. Forthcoming: “A Whore at Heart” with GRIST, and “Where Have all the Jews Gone” with UCLA’s Westwind.