Los Angeles
"Portrait of My Body as Ruin"
The Getty Villa is a museum created by J. Paul Getty, an oil tycoon with an insatiable love of ancient art—or a love of the status that collecting art brought a wealthy man in the 1950’s and 60’s. The Villa showcases Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities, many of which were buried by the 79 AD explosion of Mount Vesuvius that covered towns like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and only began to be excavated in the 19th Century.
Basically, one of the most devastating natural disasters in ancient times led to the preservation of artifacts that probably wouldn’t have survived otherwise. The ruin of entire towns, the loss of entire families, meant that 2,000 years later, we have access to daily Roman life in ways we probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. The ruin of that explosion led to the salvation of ancient art, to cross-cultural and cross-historical study and understanding. So where am I going with this history lesson?
When I was in fifth grade, I was diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome (now called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) and basically couldn’t walk without pain from then until college. In high school, I had pain treatments twice a week to be able to attend class—treatments that involved anesthesia and IV’s. By the time my RSDS went into remission, I had had anesthesia close to fifty times, was an expert on using crutches, had my own blue handicapped parking pass, and thought of my body as ruined, a site of ruin. It didn’t work the way I wanted it to, the way it was supposed to work, the way the bodies of other kids my age worked. It just sat in frustrating pain.
Of course, I didn’t have Disability Studies then, or any way to understand my difference other than as something strange, less than desirable, uncomfortable, odd. My mother tried to make my life as “normal” as possible, but when you go to a slumber party after having anesthesia leak from your vein into your surrounding skin, well, it’s hard to feel like you’re fitting in with the other girls gossiping about prom. And my pain was invisible—I didn’t have a cast on my foot, walk with a limp. I didn’t tell my friends how many pain killers I consumed to get through the day. In my mind, my body was a site of silent ruin.
This week, I’ve been thinking again about the idea of ruin, and what ruin has to teach. In many ways, I’ve overcome RSDS. I haven’t had a relapse of pain and can walk and run without much thought. But RSDS has left indelible marks on my body, my psyche, how I see myself in the world, how I understand others with visible and invisible disabilities. When I walk through the Getty Villa, I think of my body as a vase excavated from the destruction of Mount Vesuvius, a link to an ancient time that seems so different from the world where I now live. I think of my former body, how I considered it useless, a site of ruin. And I think of how much it taught me, how it survived the pain, the destruction, and emerged on the other side.
The person I am today is very different from the person I would have been without RSDS, for good or for bad. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without that constant pain or without constant trips to the hospital. But I’ve reclaimed my former negativity about the idea of ruin, and focus instead on what ruin can bring, what it can teach, how its horror can persist even as it reaches across time to emerge elegant, lovely.
This is beautiful, Andrea, and would be a great basis for a series of poems. Such experiences in childhood do change who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Before I had more severe disability again as an adult, I walked around with these layers of self that very few knew about but that made me Me.
Posted by: fridawrites | February 23, 2009 at 04:42 PM