Range of Motion (Pt. 2)

On the liberatory power of silliness

I love this photo from 2022’s student show; full video at the link below.

If I struggle with anything in life and in writing, I struggle with the body. My body. I am ashamed that I think about it as anything but functional, conditioned as I still am to believe it an unserious area of inquiry, and I am embarrassed even by concerns about functionality, as when someone asks me how my foot is and I talk for paragraphs about the confusing x-rays, the slow healing, the alarming swelling, and worry I am boring them while unable to stop. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love my body. After years of dysmorphia and disordered eating, and the drinking that was the only way to obliterate the first two, I can honestly say today that I think it is beautiful. Even, or especially, the lumpy, scarred, and swollen bits. I am in awe of its resilience and its capacity for regeneration, and I feel violently protective of its health. But the pride I might take in my physical achievements, is invariably poisoned by shame at that pride – how self-absorbed I am! – and despair that I can ever adequately communicate the pure embodied joy of flying, of dancing, and of rebuilding the strength and mobility that had been destroyed by a year of cancer treatment and two consecutive broken bones.

Case in point: the annual student show at Aloft Circus Arts, where I have trained since 2013, took place this past weekend. I last performed in the student show in May of 2022. I was in three different acts, including a piece for solo lyra (aerial hoop) that I choreographed myself to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”) I had a BLAST. I was 54 and in the best shape of my life, or at least since I was 22.  I was embedded in a supportive creative community. I was getting married in a few weeks. 

Eight days later I was diagnosed with cancer.

When the show rolled around in 2023 I was still flattened with radiation fatigue and going through immunotherapy. I had just wrapped PT for the ankle I broke falling down the stairs thanks to chemo-induced anemia. The postsurgical scarring under my left breast made it impossible to raise my arm over my head, let alone hang from a lyra. I watched that show from the audience under a thick and scratchy blanket of gloom. Next year, I told myself, I’m going to be in the show. Hashtag comma goals.

I returned to aerial training, gently, shortly after that show and not long after that started dancing again, and rowing again as well. It was spring and the air was lousy with rebirth and possibility. The gloom blanket got put in mothballs and packed away. I felt tendons stretching and muscle thickening. Endurance returned. I was achieving clinkage.

I’ve written about all this before but I refuse to be ashamed to be writing through it again. I refuse to diminish the impact cancer has had on my psyche and my body, and I refuse to maintain the oppressive fiction that they are not one and the same. 

This fall all the Aloft classes eagerly waited for the announcement of student show dates and theme and no one was more dorkily excited than I. Circus people are undoubtedly embarrassing to normies – take the high drama of theater kids, the aggro physicality of gymnasts, and the expressive musicality of dancers and put it in blender with a whole lot of sequins -– but as an art form I have found it liberatory for those very same qualities. As practice it demands an unparalleled degree of focus and presence. As spectacle it is wildly elastic. Move an audience to tears with a wordless aerial interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice?  Strip down to a sparkly nude bodysuit to the tune of “Sharp Dressed Man” while spinning 15 feet in the air? Dress up like a duckling and perform a sling act in swim fins?* Sure, why not. 

Circus has been a powerful weapon in my own battle with shame, enabling a rigorous engagement with my physical self while performing acts of deep silliness in front of total strangers. If you’re looking for the Fountain of Youth you can find it under the big top.

So I was pretty devastated when, the week we started planning the show, I fell and broke my foot. Despite some public facing attempts at acceptance, inside I was crushed. Was I never going to get within even spitting distance of my old life? Had I actually been inexorably circling the drain of age and infirmity from the moment cancer cells started dividing in my chest?

I missed classes for more than a month, hobbled on crutches and huddled under that musty blanket of gloom on the couch. But while I was gone my classmates came up with a solution: The theme for the show was myths, fairytales, and legends. Why don’t we do the seven deadly sins? And I, of course, can be cast as Sloth.

This weekend, less than two weeks out of a walking boot, I joined them on stage wrapped in sweats and a cozy brown sweater. While Lust, Envy, and their friends spun overhead I lay on a crash mat, fake-slept, and ate Pringles. At times a nasty voice in my head whispered that the audience must know I had been grounded because I was no good, too old, and broken – but whenever it spoke I just ate another potato chip and scratched my ass with exaggerated glee. That the circus makes space for those who don’t fit in, I realized, is community care enacted in public, with flair. I had a blanket with me on stage, but it wasn’t spun from gloom, it was woven with the radical acceptance of a space that understands both how strong and how fragile our bodies can be, and celebrates them all.

*All actual aerial acts I have witnessed.

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I’ll leave you with a little reading roundup. Lots of good breast cancer stuff on the internet this past week.

My writing group friend Emily Rau narrates and discusses her wonderful essay “I Might Be in Love With All My Friends,” published in the 2023  “Love and Intimacy” edition of Wildfire, the magazine that makes me wish I had gotten breast cancer when I was under 50 so that I could be a contributor. Warning: Explicit content! (Yay.)

For Valentine’s Day, Ariel Gore charts the contours of grief in the Santa Fe Reporter after her wife Deena died of metastatic breast cancer late last year. Ariel interviewed me (and many other breast cancer patients and their caregivers) for her new book Rehearsals for Dying, out next year from the Feminist Press and I for one can’t wait to read it.

While I don’t quite understand why she’s getting care for her breasts from her gynecologist, I appreciated this NYT essay by Kera Bolonik on the importance of a respectful bedside manner (which in her case also means queer-friendly). I was told I had cancer by the person doing my biopsy, while I was still lying on the table, which sucked. But when the surgical oncologist called to follow up she was wonderfully patient and kind. It made a difference.