A prick
Should I let it drip?
Stain my sheets
How long would I have to squeeze
To feel light?
Both
Head and body
Empty me out right here
I am so tired of being
Quantified
It begins with the fear in the eyes of my brothers. My head rests against a car window, I slip in and out of consciousness, my parents are half a world away. My aunt feeds me pears because I am too weak to raise my arm to my mouth. My feet tingle when I stand up to go to the bathroom (they haven’t been used in days), but first I must unplug numerous machines to be free from the bed that traps me. The face that stares back at me in the mirror is that of a ghost. Hollow cheeks and ribs that look like they could tear right through the skin.
They are told that I might not make it through the night. Numbers higher than many of the nursing staff had ever seen.
But it’s not all bad––don’t you remember the mornings spent watching cartoons? The joy you felt when your mother, adorned in her pink scarf, finally came in to see you? Dad yells at your brother for wearing heelies in the hospital and you laugh. Each day a new stuffed animal is added to a growing stack in the corner. It becomes clear that you will live.
But how?
A smattering of strawberry colored dots on my soft stomach from previous injection sites––a little constellation. It took years for me to see these red dwarfs as sources of pain. Of course the trickle of blood on my delicate skin meant something. It might have stung in a literal sense, but I refused to dwell. I didn’t know how to; it didn’t seem productive. I was a young girl whose whole life stood to be altered. No time to consider the ramifications and no adequate critical thinking processes to do so. If I should bleed, at least I’ll know I’m alive. I should be grateful as all hell.
By way of hundreds of needles, adhesives, batteries, alcohol wipes, and eventually a pump, type 1 diabetes became firmly attached to my identity, and to my body. While I became attached to this condition, I nonetheless detached myself from the ways in which living was about to become more painful than I could anticipate. What becomes of the 6-year-old I once was, the girl who had a functioning pancreas? She ceases to exist; I can hardly remember her. Nothing to compare my new life to. It was in this denial of the ways that I was hurting (or in this lack of awareness of my pain) that I lived. An internalization.
“These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it...or unable to see outside its gravity” (Jamison).
My pain was kept largely under wraps, hidden by baggy clothes and a down-trodden posture. Don’t give anyone a reason to doubt your strength, don’t give anyone a reason to feel better off. Please stop finding ways to stick out. But nobody can hide forever. My pump: a symbol clipped to pants filled by 6-year-old legs, seemed to tell everyone I was wounded. Or inhuman. Both.
I am always reminded of how truly lucky I am. Lucky to have become diabetic in 2007 instead of 1997. 1897. Any time before this present moment. I can hardly acquaint myself with a device before its superior model is released, and I begin again. And if I have no reason to be upset, I should be quiet. Is acknowledging pain selfish when the alternative is death? I don’t know. In fact, we don’t even have to talk about it. In fact, I’ll see how long I can go before disclosing it.
“The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity” (Jamison).
A pain both mediated by and borne out of technology. Even modern medicine cannot cure the inherent shame associated with being broken. Needing a machine to live. Easy to theorize about this life, this cyborg existence, but it is more than theoretical.
“Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors” (Weise).
A pancreas turned vestigial; a little blue box turned priceless. Perhaps because my strawberry scars are hidden by my shirt and my pump is tucked under my jacket, I do not look ill. I do not look ill, therefore I am not ill. Should I paint a symbol on my back?
“They want us shiny and metallic and in their image” (Weise).
My body’s relationship with technology is always in flux. Technology is about progress? No, technology is about the pressure to progress. What new wound waits for me? What glitches are in store? What scars might I collect along the way? The habit of imagining ways I might someday heal, and thus,
“the habit of imagining ways I might someday hurt” (Jamison).
To progress, I am asked to become even further removed from my body––from my skin. Asked to add things here and clip things there and prick myself into oblivion. And even when I am naked, I am not. My pump dangles like a spider from a web when it’s not clipped onto underwear or pants. So, when faced with intimacy,
“I wait until the last moment to un-tech” (Weise).
When I do, a new pain is felt. Here is when my constellation becomes impossible to hide. Am I human enough? What will he think of my tummy scars? My tummy stars. Disclaimer after disclaimer. Or silence that pricks just like my fine point needles.
“We want our wounds to speak for themselves...but usually we end up having to speak for them” (Jamison).
A meeting of flesh. But I am more than flesh and somehow less human for it.
My pump may be a part of my body, but I won’t be able to feel it if a finger should graze.
I’m numb. Like Sethe’s back as it’s traced by Paul D’s adoring fingers. I’ll take it off so I can feel normal, but the blissful feeling only lasts as long as it takes for the sugar in my blood to accumulate.
To be a cyborg is to live on the line between human and machine. To be a cyborg is to fear that the thing that saves your life may also be the thing that ends it.
“Will a stalker, a doctor or the law kill me?” (Weise).
They tell me my life will be easier if I get a new machine. They may be right. But I fear losing the relationship with my skin. I fear the tingling that I once felt in my feet as I became more machine than girl. What do I stand to lose? These are the questions that are inherently ignored when we become obsessed with progress. Progress is not universal, and neither are the experiences of the chronically ill. Live or die? Pay or die. And thus a new wound is created.
“the act of admitting one wound creates another one” (Jamison).
I poke my finger, squeeze, and think about being empty. I wonder if I already am.