Several years ago I found myself lying on a gurney talking about Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass with the paramedic. I had dislocated my elbow. The paramedic had just given me my second dose of painkillers for the day. For those of you with the good fortune to not know, a dislocated elbow is one of the most painful injuries a person can sustain. You know the feeling you get when you hit your funny bone? Now imagine that times a thousand and imagine your arm turned backwards. I did this to myself while rock climbing in a gym. I didn’t fall (I rarely fall). Instead, I’d misjudged how high the top of the climb was from the floor and when I let go, my left arm caught my fall, and my elbow absorbed the force of gravity. There aren’t words to describe the pain, but I do recall putting myself into a meditative trance while I waited for the paramedics to arrive. I’d been told that when they arrived they would pop my arm back into place and alleviate the pain. That wasn’t true. A dislocated elbow is much worse than a dislocated shoulder, and I’d have to wait until a professional at the emergency room could assess the situation. The whole thing reminds me of a moment in Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live, where he writes about letting the pain in: “Whatever limits the entrance of awareness limits healing…If you bang your elbow, notice how that first moment of pain spirals out into space like a skyrocket, then fizzles and falls to earth as a full dull sparks. Let it float. Send loving kindness into the elbow.”
I don’t really recall the gist of the conversation with the paramedic, other than that I told him that my pain was about a 5 or so, and then proceeded to scream when he tried to move me into the ambulance. Pain medication was administered in short order and I was given a lecture on my failure to understand the pain scale.
“Is this the worst pain you’ve ever had?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Then you say it’s a 10,” he explained.
I didn’t have the mental acuity to argue about my epistemological qualms with his pain scale. I had imagined that I was being asked to interpret my pain on a more impersonal level. For example, I imagined what it would feel like to be dying, or actively dying. I figured that wasn’t happening, so 5 (halfway toward death) sounded fairly reasonable. I suppose if I had told him I was feeling half-dead, he might have administered the painkillers sooner…
Anyway, at some point I think I told him I was a writer and the conversation drifted to the books I was reading. I told him I was reading You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. I don’t remember the whole conversation. I was on a lot of drugs on account of the elbow. I do recall telling the paramedic that while I enjoyed the idea of You are a Badass I found some parts wanting. Needless to say, during the course of this conversation, I didn’t feel at all like a badass.
Sincero writes “…it’s not your fault that you’re fucked up. It’s your fault if you stay fucked up…” Which would be all well and good, except I was sitting on a gurney hopped up on a rockstar-killing drug cocktail, and yet somehow cognizant enough to ask the orthopedic surgeon how much this whole thing was going to cost me. He stressed how fortunate I was I hadn’t broken anything.
“You would have needed surgery,” he explained. I was asked to sign a bunch of papers before they gave me morphine and did what they began to refer to as “the procedure.” It’s not like I had any choice anyway. I was going to pay whatever they were going to charge; I needed my arm bones put back into their respective sockets. But yes, I guess it would have been my fault if I’d had walked out with a backwards arm, so I agreed to “the procedure.” (I only finally paid off the several thousand-dollar bill off a few months ago).
While I agree that we are often the architects of our own stagnation, failure, and loss due to our self-limiting beliefs and self-sabotage, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that some of us suffer some real circumstances that cannot be overcome by thinking alone. Changing my self-limiting beliefs isn’t going to end poverty, or police officers shooting people in the street, or injustice, and thought alone wasn’t going to get my arm put on right (signing that paper with my good hand was). We think we’re in control when we’re not, and we sometimes think we’re not in control when we are. The key is knowing the difference.
Like Sincero, I do believe that mindset does play a role in life, and while I couldn’t afford the physical therapist I was told I should see in the weeks that followed the injury, I did spend quite a bit of time on YouTube Googling the videos of other injured people like me who shared with the world the exercises their expensive physical therapists had taught them. I couldn’t bend my elbow for weeks, but daily exercises along with daily swimming at a nearby gym eventually got my elbow back to bending again. Sometimes all it takes is the right YouTube channel.
I think the best lesson that self-help books like this one can provide us is the brute fact that if we don’t put ourselves out there and start taking risks, nothing is going to happen for us. And if you’re worried what people think of you or what you’ll look like while putting yourself out there, the first whiff of criticism you get will send you back into your cave. Sometimes you just need to go for it, fucked elbows be damned.
Sincero says it pretty well: “What other people think about you has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.” I’d add this: find a few people whose feedback you trust and listen to them. Everyone else—ignore. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself chasing your own tail trying to please everyone else.
When we are clear about our truth, we are unstoppable, even with a dislocated elbow that can’t bend….which brings me to the glorious end to my pitiful tale.
I have to say that there’s something mysterious about Sincero’s book, something that rippled through my own life, that helped me see that dislocating my elbow was a sign I was on the right path.
Sincero writes: “When taking great leaps forward, life often turns to shit before it turns to Shinola.” She then goes on to talk about one of her clients who quits his high-paying job to start his own business only to experience three flat tires, a car accident, a broken water main, and if all that wasn’t enough—before his first big deal—he got hit by a bus. I’ve seen this phenomenon happen with friends, too. Right before they change their lives, right before something big and important is about to happen to them, the shit hits the fan. The car battery dies, or they break a leg, literally. The mystery of life is that I feel like we are sometimes guided by a force that moves the sun and other stars, a mysterious gravity, just like the kind that pulled me to the ground and almost broke my arm in two.
In honor of that great mystery, I think it’s important to note that I dislocated my elbow exactly one week before I was going to get on a plane to fly to Hawaii. I had decided to move to Oahu for beauty, to live more in tune with nature, to maybe someday learn to grow my own food, catch my own fish, catch bigger waves. Many people told me I was nuts for getting on the airplane. “Maybe wait a few months…” “Heal a bit…”
But I got on the airplane. My elbow was fucked up; I couldn’t bend it for shit, I had just taken my last painkiller while waiting to board the flight, and when I landed and stared out at the star-jeweled Pacific, half-drugged on the scent of plumeria, all I could feel was a sense of overwhelming dread and fear and pain. I’m not sure how much of that was real and how much of that was the withdrawal from the pain medicine, but I do know that I didn’t give up. I moved to Hawaii. My reasons for moving were honest and good and it was the best decision I ever made. Maybe I am a badass after all.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.