By: Antonia Deignan
Deciding to face the upsets, challenges, or straight up traumas of childhood is not easy. Choosing to do so at the age of fifty-five, maybe even less so, but who’s to say when the best time will be to circle back to adversity?
There were a lot of coping skills I tried on between the age of five (onset of trauma) and fifty-five (bike accident).
At the time of my accident in 2018, some of my coping mechanisms were still in place: denial/silence/diversion aka dance. Others were left behind as I had grown out of them: substance abuse/eating disorders, self-harming. And more recently to help with normal ups and downs I had found meditation, counseling, and wellness schtick.
Occasionally, a situation presents itself however, requiring deeper survival skills. Like that moment when your world suddenly shifts, shuts down, and becomes the size of a pin hole, and as it is rapidly evaporating, you feel as though you’ve been reduced to only one basic function, which is finding your next breath. (That’s what it felt like to me.) Once that happens, like that Humpty Dumpty crash and burn bike accident, lifelong coping strategies no longer feel accessible.
The accident revealed two things. As a survivor from way back, after the initial shock of catastrophe, I instinctively began charting toward my what next. Mangled on the asphalt underneath the totaled road bike, I trained my thoughts toward rational ones. Morphined up, and an EMT escort to the Emergency room, led to a few surgeries and decent supply of hardware for my upper limbs. On the mend, I turned to small repeatable patterns, baby steps of realistic goals, tiny, doable, toddler-type milestones to reach for. Like the quiet young girl who attempted to protect herself from abuse growing up, I narrowed my focus to those minute-to-minute accomplishments. And I prayed. Ok. I may have been a tad bit impatient at times, and experienced an occasional emotional meltdown, but mostly I was relentlessly disciplined on a path toward returning to full and robust health.
While braced in thermoplastic splints from shoulders to knuckles, I hummed melodies in sync to my stretching fingertips, in, out, in, out, jazzing up the circulation in my arms. I tapped finger pads on countertops, opened fingers, closed fingers. I begged my physical therapists to (please) push me harder. It wasn’t what I couldn’t do, (and didn’t for a very long time) it was what could I do.
But the fact was, (the second takeaway) emotionally and psychologically I had been stripped of my default self, the identity I’d nurtured from way back, and relied on. What had saved me so long ago (dance) I began to understand, had also buried me.
Creative movement, sweaty calisthenics, therapy band, and body weight drills, twenty-mile bike rides and 5k runs, dance – these were still my tried-and-true identity markers. The trauma of my childhood had been packed tightly into a highly disciplined girl who eventually became a professional dancer. What the aftermath of the accident helped revealed was, this disguise beautifully and tragically hid that little girl’s broken and betrayed heart.
In the first six months post bike accident, mostly in bed, mostly drugged, I no longer knew who I was.
Without much else to grab on to, I picked up a pen. At first, it was just ugly, messy, confusing, remembering. But I kept going, opening fresh journals, running out of pages, waking up in the middle of the night to write something down. I asked for a laptop and began saving documents. I landed in a writing circle on Zoom. (It was Covid at this point, the lockdown and onset of social distancing began two years after my accident while I was still recovering.) I felt like the Phoenix rising out of her ashes. I began to embrace miracles, the most important one being I could let go of how I had identified myself all my life and begin again.
By hunting down and writing out my stories, I saw my past obstacles differently, and I sat with my perceptions of those obstacles for a long time. My writing allowed me to unlearn and relearn the knowns and unknowns of my past, and ultimately, gave me a chance to employ a more loving lens there, on a history previously gripped mostly in fear. I understood how dance enabled me to move forward and protected me but that I had a chance now to be more than a silent performer.
With my writing, I unearthed that intense inner focus I used to overcome the aftermath of abuse. With my writing, I unearthed how I leaned into the whelm of joy, and that I trusted those experiences of joy when I was a young girl and turned them into my salvations. With my writing, I learned that my creative expression as a dancer, was how I tapped into my inner stillness, a place of beautiful longing. I could “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world” – Joseph Campbell
And so, at the age of fifty-five I circled back and studied my past. And with the new tool of writing, I found a different way to move and be, empowered instead of ashamed, included in life instead of separated away from it. My writing, like my dancing before it, spelled out longing. But when longing accompanies sorrow, and is then held with care and reverence, it can invite transcendence. *
My writing, in fact, was bringing me home.
*Inspired by Susan Cain’s Bittersweet
Antonia Deignan is a mother of five children by choice, a dancer by calling, and a writer by necessity. She was born on the east coast, but lived primarily in the Midwest, where she danced with multiple dance companies and raised her children. She opened her own dance studio and directed a pre-professional dance company before a bike accident wish-boned her path, and her identity. She has multiple publications in magazine and online formats. Her memoir, Underwater Daughter, will be published in May 2023.