I've got my spine, I've got my Orange Crush

Last Monday afternoon, as I went to walk Bowie in the humidified heat of an ungodly Toronto summer, as I put an XXL shirt on over my work from home uniform of choice — less than clean bike shorts and sports bra — and grabbed the door handle to leave air conditioning for a mass of heat and moisture it came back to me. A memory held in the body that buckled me over like a door stuck on the jamb and suddenly I couldn’t stand up straight or move comfortably without intense pain.

I’m bouncing back, but I can feel it still, a twinge in the driver's side of my body, there on the hip as I try and correct imperfect posture in my chair.

Before I worked as a writer, or a culture critic or as whatever people say when they introduce me on the rare occurrences they introduce me, I was a glazier. I have said for a long time that I worked in construction, but something I’ve come to realize from working on the book was being vague about my past doesn’t do the memories any favours and so now I tell people that I was, and still technically am, a Journeyman Glazier.

I wait to eventually meet someone who knows what that means, a job title more often met with stares than knowing nods, except for the time I learned on Twitter that Josh Gondelman’s dad is also a glazier in a rare and beautiful moment of feeling understood.

I’m a third generation glazier. My grandfather, who I never met, opened a glass shop in Vancouver after WW2 when my father and his family immigrated from Wales. Glazing is a family trade, fathers teaching sons who become fathers with sons to teach once more. I sullied that expectation by learning the skills but abdicating my role as a son and instead became a daughter with no means or desire to continue the successive tradition. My dad is and should be proud of being very good at his job and is the reason I was ever good at mine, but he’s never demanded that I be anyone at all. He’s only ever tried to be there to see who I might become.

I have three near-death experiences from my past as a glazer:

One - I was pinned against a wall by a machine that hauls sheets of glass from a rack to a table and had to protect myself as glass shattered over my body against the wall. I put tape and super glue on all the cuts all down my hands, arms and neck, some of which are memories on my skin to this day. I was working alone in a glass shop listening to the greatest hits of R.E.M, and to this day hearing “Orange Crush” is the soundtrack to a panicked memory.

Two - I rolled my work van on the highway in the dead of winter in the Yukon. I rolled over the driver's side first, the more dangerous style of rolling a vehicle. When the vehicle came to rest, I ended up stranded in the woods without cell service and had to walk out to the highway to wait and see if a car might come along that could take me away from all this. I still have the iPod I rescued from that van, I had been listening to old episodes of The Best Show on WFMU and Grandaddy’s Sumday and they are now sacred relics kept in the dead battery of a device I swear I’ll fix eventually, though there is something fitting about a Grandaddy song being trapped in limbo in a retired piece of technology.

Three - I fell off the top of a 6 foot ladder, hitting my face on the ladder as it overturned on the ground 2 inches away from a chunk of rebar sticking out the ground which I was almost impaled on. I think about this one about once a week and wince at the memory of it still. How close to death you can get, that you can see it when you open your eyes.

Those are the three big events, and this doesn’t even begin to count all the minor occurrences of personal injury. The cuts and bruises and the scars. The odors of memorable hospital visits, the scratchy smell of frayed gauze and tape holding back ferrous blood. The time I was temporarily blinded in my left eye because I got glass in it and scratched the cornea. None of these are the reason I have a recurring back injury though, that story is easier and far sillier; I slipped on the ice and fell on my butt at the dump.

It was winter in the Yukon, I was throwing dead motors and junk aluminum from old automatic doors into the metal bin in January, under clear skies and a hint of sun. The ominous beauty of a northern winter, the most picturesque moments tend to be the backdrops of cold and harsh days. I lost my footing on the ground, my feet went out, I fell hard on my ass and then slid helplessly on the slight downward slope to my truck and got stuck underneath the box of it for just a second, scrambling to regain my footing while dealing with the shooting pain coursing through my body. I got up, dusted myself off, jumped in my truck and drove away. I still had one more job to do that day, and I limped through the embarrassing recollection of falling on my ass at the dump to anyone who asked why I was walking funny. I went home that night and laid on the floor, got blackout drunk and forgot all about where I had been and where I had fallen.

For years my back problem was just a thing I limped through. I had to work and so I pushed through and then went home and laid on the floor and drank to forget. I would ask doctors about it and they would shrug, half-heartedly x-ray me and tell me that I had the normal kind of pain for someone like me. I was a person who worked with my hands and so I should expect to hurt and I should expect to feel bad. I have a photo in my memories of the time a doctor wrote “do yoga” on a script and slid it across the table to me when I told him it hurt to walk.

When the nerve pain started in my left leg and it became hard to stand up straight at all someone referred me to an osteopath and it was there in a dimly lit office behind an industrial park on the Klondike Highway that she ran her fingers down my spine briefly and then asked me simply “tell me about the time you fell”.

Falling on my butt at the dump came rushing back and in five minutes she found a problem that doctors had spent years telling me was my own fault for not having the right kind of life.

I have an impacted tailbone that is also kind of twisted off to the side where my hip bone is and at its worst I didn’t even know that the muscle had gathered around my hip to protect it because it had been so bad for so long. Whenever I moved my left leg, my tailbone and my hip bone rubbed against each other. This is where the pain comes in.

The osteopath and her bone wizardry gave me solutions. Stretch. Work your core. Take it easy. Have you tried swimming? Great low impact exercise. I don’t know how to swim I told her, but maybe I should learn. I try to be good about preventative maintenance, but sometimes I’m not and every now and then my body tells me stories of all it has been through.

It is everything I can do to avoid writing the body keeps the score, that feels too easy or too simple. The score doesn’t always matter, it’s how we manage the aftermath.

It’s unfair, in a way. I transitioned, doesn’t my body know this? I know its old stories and what purpose do they serve me now? I have moved past them, I have shifted beyond the trappings of what came before and now I’m someone new, a perfect mass in need of form and new functions. Truth be told, I always bristle against the promise of transition as this great fix. Like all great fixes, like sobriety, transition is work I task myself with doing. Learning to accept what has been and what needs to be done to claim ownership of this body I have mistreated for so long.

Self destruction in search of form. I have been thinking a lot about pain in need of a body — which may just be the form of a follow up book I’m sketching out right now — and how this pain is the memory of a life I have left behind. These stories of someone who was, someone trying so hard to convince himself of the lie he had committed to and the damage inflicted by careless desire.

The pain in my body is the reminder of that connective tissue between what was and what is.

On Wednesdays, I do voice training with a coach over zoom. My voice is the last remaining piece of a puzzle that needs to be shuffled away and put back on the shelf. There to be casually remembered but no longer in need of work or shape. I know what the image was, it’s no longer relevant to what the picture needs to become.

I don’t want the voice that comes out of me, it isn’t mine and never really has been, a body in pain telling stories of a life left behind. I want to know what Niko sounds like and I am committed to the work of finding her. I told my vocal coach I write in a voice I have never heard, and I think about this constantly as I go back and edit my work, or prep for a podcast, practice a reading. The voice that I use comes from another place, holding on in mockery of moving forward.

On Wednesday, with the pain still in my body and insomnia in my throat I couldn’t make it 20 minutes before my coach told me we would have to stop the lesson. When I logged on and spoke they asked me what’s going on with your voice and it struck me that they were hearing the memory of me for the first time, this body in pain, reverted to an older life. I couldn’t do the work that day that was needed to help me move past the painful memories of what was. I logged off, shuffled off to the bathroom, cried behind a locked door.

This is the pain of a memory that doesn’t fully belong to me anymore. Sometimes when I tell stories about my past, before I transitioned and before I was whatever people introduce me as now, it’s as if I’m telling stories of someone else. This person, gone and forgotten. I can see him, his unkempt hair, his beard and slumping posture. Eyes tired and stern, not sad, just empty like a dirty glass in need of a rinse and then a refill. I can hear his voice when I open my mouth to read and tell stories, I can be reminder of him, how he hurt and how he stumbled and it dawns on me that part of this work, this grappling with and cataloging of memories, is learning to make peace with a past that can’t be healed.

The true promise of transition and sobriety and all big changes is asking to remember all the things I have worked to forget and carelessly put away. To give each hard and difficult thing a name, honor where it has been and the memories it has left on me, and then learn how to move on. Marks of a life gone away, not forgotten but no longer needed. If I want these promises to be real, I need to carefully push myself forward, I need to stretch and train, acknowledge what has been and what is yet to come. Maybe all this pain is just the reminder to keep going, there is still work to be done, that it is on me to be ready to become all the memories that have yet to mark themselves on my skin.