I got pied in the face with the truth today.

I’ve spent a lot of time ignoring my own needs. They have been an inconvenience — like the starched, white button-up T, skinny black tie wearing juveniles who used to filter through the little hospital housing I lived in on the Navajo Nation. I’d spot them ahead of me on my walk home turning the corner into the development, halt, hold my breath so they may not hear me and begin a sloth-like walking pace to avoid any interaction with the peddlers of John Smith’s holy philosophies.

I saw them, but went my own way. I heard them knocking but pretended not to. It was no different to how I treated hunger, thirst, voiding, sleep. And we are taught and expected to move this way — it’s not like every patient understands that you’re a person too and have to pee every once in a while, and there aren’t any pee breaks built into a physical therapist’s tight schedule anyway.

Ok, we’re all finished for today. Then the choice: finish writing notes or use the bathroom. Usually, it was notes.

After a while, I started training my patients to give the bare minimum to myself: I’d walk in still chewing a pancake or invite them into the treatment room, pass them through the door in the opposite direction and run down the hall barefoot to the toilet.

Today I laid on the massage table at the Therapy on the Rocks Myofascial Release clinic in Sedona, Arizona in a bra and underwear staring at the ceiling while a stranger laid the ground rules for the session.

“I want open communication here. If you need something I need you to say it.”

My face was already dripping off, like the sweat that started to form on the back of my knees at the thought.

Her hands laid on and around my hip. I stiffened and sweated subtly — a technique I had long used to endure any kind of touch. I had forgotten. Her words buzzed like a bee inside my head and I gripped my thighs tighter. I tried to relax them. They tightened again. I softened them. Seconds later, tight again.

It felt like ping pong, to say or not to say, to choose myself or the duty to perform and allow ping-ponging around in my head. I blurted out:

“I don’t like being touched at all by anyone.”

And then I noticed my hunger. I heard her words again.

“It’s very important that you tell me what you need”

And then the pie hit me square in the face, obstructing my pie hole, eyes and nose with the thick cream of realization.

I felt my hunger again, this time actually noticing it, and as I began to sense it more deeply the awareness shoved me abruptly off of the ledge into a deep, freezing pool. The shock woke me up.

My hunger was no longer an inconsequential thing, but suddenly sounded like a plea. Crying, desperate, emotional. There was nothing neutral about it. And suddenly, I felt sick.

The Mormon boys were now the least of my worries.

I started flashing through the times I’d held onto pee for hours, hiked miles past my hunger point, worked through without drinking anything. I was guilty of abuse and neglect.

For the first time, I felt sad for how I had treated myself. And then my stomach turned over again.

My poor body. It had always asked politely and eventually been forced to resort to begging and pleading — crawling towards me knees and dirty sack-for-a-frock dragging in the dirt, collapsing at my feet and I still had turned away my nose. I hadn’t even registered it as important.

It’s disgusting that you can learn to be this way.

It’s a vessel, a means to an end, something that is a drag, or as my friend used to say, ‘a stupid skin sack to carry around’. I don’t know a lot of people who aren’t dissociated from their body, treat it as ‘the problem’ when it isn’t working right, or just don’t care to acknowledge that it’s doing anything important for them at all.

And I’m just as guilty, and on two counts. And so I’ve neglected myself and the most important thing that I have, all in the name of people-pleasing and rule-following.

I’d like to issue a formal apology to my beautiful skin sack, but I feel way too much shame. It doesn’t feel like an apology could even begin to be enough. But I had to do something today to start making amends and it felt easier to use action instead of just words. So I chose food over prolonging eating in favor of ‘getting more done’ today.

It isn’t enough. It’s a start of a long journey of repair.

BUT.

That’s one small step for Alana, lacking any leap for mankind.