are broken ankles a renewable source of energy?

I met Yukon for the first time in Wrigleyville, a neighborhood that I picked because I knew the giant, two story Small Cheval there, the one with the open-air rooftop lounge on the second floor, would be completely empty in the off-season, while the Cubs were not losing because they were not currently playing. It's kind of a funny spot to meet but I like the burgers and the vegan milkshakes.

Yukon and I met each other in the aftermath of seismic life shifts, the kind that turns you into a completely new person once you're done with it.

Who I was when we met: single, living alone, and fresh off the plane from a post-divorce couch surfing tour on the West Coast. A life that I had spent exactly two weeks living inside.

This was who Yukon was when we met: new to the city, living alone, fresh off a year-ish long stint of digital nomadism, wherein she spent a weeks at a time in different cities around the States, seeing old friends — and it seems to me living a big beautiful fun life for a while. She dubbed this stint of travel The America is Beautiful Tour, all of which I found out about via PowerPoint†, which she walked through on her phone while we chowed down on some burgers.

After checking out Chicago (and unexpectedly falling in love with it as many of us do), Providence, Los Angeles, and New York, she decided that this was going to be Her Place. The difference, among many, between the two of us was that the catalyst for my paradigm shift was a break up and the catalyst for hers was the breaking of her two ankles.

In the last year, I've probably made Yukon retell the story of her broken ankles a dozen times and it generally goes like this:

1. Yukon, living at home in the Dallas suburbs during the pandemic, gets into rollerskating because it's the fun thing to do
2. She turns too sharply on a ramp at a skate park and breaks her ankle. Only, she thought it was a sprain and not a break until a few days later when her dad's chiropractor diagnoses her and informs her she needs surgery.
3. Once she's healed, she gets back on the rollerskates because she does not let an injury keep her down.
   1. 6 months later, she breaks the other ankle.
4. This time, she knows something is wrong. Mostly because of her previous broken ankle and the familiar "loose" feeling in her ankle. Because of the break, the soft tissue holding her bones in place are out of place, creating a "floppy" sensation.
5. While she's convalescing from her second broken ankle she has the realization that she doesn't want to be the kind of girl living in the suburbs of Dallas, in her parents' house, breaking her ankles rollerskating. So, she leaves.

I've been asking Yukon about her broken ankle saga over and over again for the last year partially because its a very entertaining story and partially because I felt that it was hard to imagnie this previous version of Yukon, or at least how she describes herself – a sex negative, avoidant queen living at home. Now, she's this fun, funny, liberated, independent queen. Maybe that transformation, the Yukon before the broken ankles and the one after is what I was interested in. I wanted to understand why we felt pain, what was the point of it, and if the answer was nestled into this story about a mid-pandemic rollerskate-career-ending injury.

One of many of Yukon's many admirable traits besides her sneaky sense of humor and ability to accomplish seemingly anything is that she loves to clean. Because she is the best kind of friend one could have, she offered to come over and help me deep clean my apartment so that I could enter this new phase of my life as a debut author with some dignity.

We spent a solid 5 hours getting this 100 year old apartment that I inherited from an equally magical, equally sloppy bisexual from top to bottom. I wiped down the fans and the banisters, Yukon wiped dark-colored gunk off the walls that I didn't realize could be wiped off. We dragged my five billion pound shag rug to the back patio so that we could spank all the crud out of its curly green hair — so many particles of dust and crumbs and loose threads and hair fell out it looked like we were making it snow in the alley behind my building. That is all to say, we cleaned until we felt sort of sore and hollow and accomplished, and then we got dinner nearby instead of having the meal I promised to cook us because I was delusional when I thought I would cook a meal in my newly clean kitchen after spending 5 hours cleaning it.

While we walk back to my apartment and the soreness of physical labor starts to creep into my lily-livered, white-collared joints, I ask Yukon how it felt when she broke her ankles. She'd already told the story to me so many times, and yet every time I wince when I think of her falling over and bending her foot at the wrong ankle, crashing into the asphalt, all of her ligaments and bones coming apart – but she's never actually mentioned the pain. Did it even hurt?

It's drizzling on the way back from dinner and I'm honestly struggling to walk because I'm so physically exhausted from cleaning. When I ask her my question, she tells me that she has a "wacky" relationship to pain - hence her broken ankle story referring to the feeling of a broken bone as "loose" and "floppy" rather than "very, very painful."

In general, her relationship to pain seemed to be different than mine and most other people's. She, unlike me, does not seek out emotionally volatile relationships with erratic artsy people. She keeps a diary like me, but is much less interested in excavating her bloodiest, innermost feelings for the sake of art than I am. She did not hesitate to schedule an early replacement of her IUD when her OB-GYN suggested it, just in case Trump won — it seemed like a good idea and anyway, the pain of having it installed was minimal. I have no idea what it feels like to get an IUD in but I've heard sentences like "it feels worse than giving birth" and "I was bleeding for three months afterwards."

I wanted more information, in general about the human body's relationship to pain. I wanted to understand it because it feels like this phenomena that is simultaneously super biological and scientific and also spiritual, and weird, and esoteric.

So I asked approximately twenty people these two questions:

A. Have you ever broken a bone?
B. What is your relationship to pain?

Me, personally, I generally like to think I'm pretty attuned to my own pain – that I can definitely feel hurt but that I have a high pain tolerance. I'm not sure if tolerance is the right word actually - maybe it's more like I have a comparatively high affinity for pain. I've written before about being spanked until my ass is a pile of white sparkly stinging sensations, about jumping into Lake Michigan so that all my follicles froze into sharp icicles that poked into me like little acupuncture needles - those were honestly unpleasant experiences, but in a way that was kind of thrilling.

Okay, so, perhaps my barometer for pain teeters into the self-destructive route, like when I took myself to the bathhouse just to feel something in the dark of winter and let anybody and everybody come use my body however they want so that I went home with a ripped asshole and a breakout of oral herpes (which i already had!) that tore my face asunder with big red blisters.

I have a penchant for emotional pain, too, I think. At least, I do now. Most of my avoidant tendencies have been replaced with a hunger for catharsis. Ever since my divorce I'm on a quest to feel it all. Bottling things up, not speaking the 100% brutal honesty twisted me up inside and confused me.

Now, I want to know what this human life is capable of, I want to fight with a friend (if it means we get closer) I want to be mad at a boy and hold a one sided grievance for a day or two because it feels good to hold something slightly hot and angry near my heart. I want to sleep with an asshole and kick him out of my apartment. I want to cry over a bowl of soondobu because I'm feeling heartsick. I want honest feelings to rise up within me and tear me a part. I like that kind of pain.

Despite all of the masochistic tendencies outlined above, I honestly spend most of my life seeking and experiencing joy. From my friends, food, from reading, and writing and art and sex. So, it's nice to let a tide of negativity and angst wash over me. I like to feel it, soak in it, get by the window and watch the storm of my own petty sorrow pass by.

I've never broken a bone and I'm not hardcore enough of a masochist to seek that level of pain out deliberately. But maybe I am the kind of masochist that wants to break the ankles of my heart - just to know what it feels like, or what it will feel like afterwards when the pain subsides and the euphoric clarity settles in, over the eyes, over the body.

† The PowerPoint had graphs.