Your ideas of "injury" and "recovery" are a trap

Why the narratives you have in your mind about injury, recovery, and training through pain are steeped in white supremacist, eugenicist, and ableist ideals. It turns out even injury and rehab are political.

What happens when you experience an injury or change in performance

I've had several "setbacks" in the past few years in acro: one major accident that impacted my cervical spine and nerve function through my whole left side, and several smaller incidents impacting tendons and tissue in my right leg, right elbow, and right hand. As a person who grew up in a constant stream of medical events and chronic illness, I've internalized a lot of narratives about what makes a body "good:" bodies that function with ease, that don't experience pain, that act in predictable ways, that don't need intervention or medication, that appear outwardly healthy and aesthetically appealing.

It's easy to fall into mental sinkholes, then, any time an injury gets in the way of performing how I want or expect my body to. I've worried that my body might never be able to do the things I love ever again—that if I can't continue to perform acrobatically, I'd lose my entire community of friends and training partners—or that I might not be strong or capable enough to progress in my solo training.

The bogeyman of a "broken" body isn't just one that lives in my own head—it was systematically put into all of our minds by a society that values some bodies over others. The idea that injury is a setback at all, or that recovery is necessary, or that there is a standard of function we must achieve—all of these are hallmarks of a white supremacist, eugenicist, and ableist ideal. There's an imagined body, the "good" body, that does everything that is expected of it, that complies with and conforms to every societal script.

Sports are just one way that this message is communicated, and that we're able to internalize the expectations without suspicion. As participants, we internalize the belief that our value (especially on teams) is related to our performance. As spectators, we mourn the loss of athletes whose injuries end their careers, or who age out of competing at the highest levels (more on competitive sports and their hidden political agendas coming in future writing).

When we're injured, we're in a physically vulnerable position already. We're experiencing pain, perhaps to the extent that it interferes with daily activities, perhaps suddenly or unpredictably or in a way that will also cause financial hardship or put a strain on our relationships. In that vulnerable position, then, it's easy to fall back on unexamined beliefs about our own worth (or lack thereof) when our body isn't living up to expectations. We might even try to downplay the pain or rush back to activities without adequate preparation, desperate to prove that we aren't broken or incapable or aging or disabled.

Why narratives around injury are actually ugly supremacist, ableist, and eugenicist arguments in a trenchcoat

It makes sense to be scared of all these potential losses—in performance, in relationships, in day-to-day function—as a result of injury or changes in physical function. Many of our modern societies simply aren't designed with care or support in mind. Taking time away from work, shifting responsibilities in the home, accessing rehabilitative support: all of these require time and financial resources, not to mention functioning systems of care by community and trained healthcare practitioners.

But it's too easy to let that fear entrench you in the belief that your body is only "good" when it "functions," whatever that means. That it's only worthy when it's able to work in the labor force to pay bills, or when it's able to lift weights that were your previous PRs or are standard benchmarks for someone in the categories you feel you belong to (age, weight, gender, whatever they may be). If you have the resources, maybe you tank a lot of time and energy and financial capital into getting the best care possible: a great physical therapist, a personal trainer, sports medicine specialists, acupuncture, massage, the works.

It's worth taking the time to pause here, though, and reflect. What would happen if your body didn't "go back" to how it was before the injury or medical event? What if the change is permanent, or what if it progresses with more pain and less familiar function? Preparing for these possibilities in a practical sense is one thing, but more importantly, the idea that rehabilitation to a level of peak performance or past functioning or parity between limbs is the only metric for success, value, and worth is deeply dangerous.

The idea that physical disability is a personal failing rather than a function of structural barriers is a pervasive one, and so easily reinforced by systems that phase you out of support after a 12 week cycle of rehab sessions, or write off the amount of function that you should be satisfied with because of your age, gender, or physical ambitions.

Believing that your baseline level of function must be your inevitable goal after an injury is a trap—one that can keep you depressed and in a fearful, shut-down mindset, but also one that reinforces our social system's marginalization of people whose bodies are permanently changed, degrade or age, lose or change function.

So... what should you do when you're injured and want to get back to physical training?

First, give yourself space. It makes perfect sense that dealing with pain, uncertainty, and a change in how your body acts and reacts can bring up so many fears and negative feelings. Rushing to "fix" the situation or "return to normal" is itself an impulse fed to us by a white supremacist culture that expects conformity, neutrality, and non-emotionality.

Second, call in your support team. Finding community care and health professionals who understand you, who share your political outlook on the value of your body and movement, and who can remind you to stay grounded in whatever reality has in store rather than rushing to some ideal (attainable or otherwise) is key.

Third, find ways to be in your body. I could even use the word "train" here, but I use it loosely. From personal experience, I will say that it's really easy to try to dissociate from the negative sensations that arise from injury or medical complications. Sometimes it feels safer to flee into other states or activities (whether that's with substances, or binge-watching TV, or intellectual pursuits). All of those things are totally fine and understandable to an extent, but finding ways to stay with your physical sensations and experience can help reinforce for you that your body is still a home, still worthy, and still a site of movement and connection, even if parts of how it's behaving don't feel familiar right now.

How you "train" with pain, in the wake of an acute injury, or amidst ongoing instability from chronic illness, isn't actually different: all training is about finding ways to move your body and interact with the world, to practice patterns and shift outcomes. What your training looks like might shift, but all bodies are changing and training and moving constantly.

Holding too firm an attachment to a rigid, linear notion of what your training or performance must look like isn't only a recipe for disappointment, it's also a reinvestment in ableist narratives that tell us that all bodies should do the same behaviors in the same way.

Breaking out of the box of ableism

Treating "injured" versus "recovered"/"healed" as two discrete states of being is a trap. That binary is the foundation for believing that bodies experiencing pain or change are fundamentally different (or worse) than "normal" or "regular" bodies, which itself is a slippery slope to creating a value hierarchy that idealizes some bodies at the expense of others. All bodies are in processes of change, and any body that exists long enough will experience pain, injury, illness, disfigurement, disablement, and aging.

Situating your own body or other people's bodies on a linear trajectory where being injured is a lesser-than status relative to being "healed" keeps us confined in an ableist box—it doesn't let us explore all the ways that bodies can feel and move, and it turns training into something that is only reserved for bodies deemed worthy enough to engage in projects of strength-building or perfection-chasing.

Training amidst injury isn't the only time to be considering how your internalized narratives, or the ones you use with clients and training partners, reflects political projects. Our ideals about how bodies should move or perform is only one area in which ableist and white supremacist ideals arise. How we think bodies should look, how we categorize bodies by size or gender or level, how we design metrics and competition—all of these also smuggle in expectations that are steeped in political projects meant to value some bodies and experiences, and to discipline or revile others.

While it's possible to confront and dismantle our internalized beliefs even in acute stages of injury and recovery, these are narratives we need to confront on an ongoing basis if we hope to make systemic change in the world.

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You can reach out directly for 1:1 political peer mentorship to learn how to approach these types of challenges with your own training or your clients.

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