My Left Hip

Content Warning: Yoga, professional eating disorders, Million-Dollar Chiropractors, Sensitive New Age Guys (SNAGS). Brief mention of sexual assault and suicide. Certain names and identifying information have been changed for confidentiality purposes.

“I had an active childhood,” I always say if ever anyone asks me how I get my biceps. An active childhood, and a professional eating disorder. But on Thursday, March 17, 2011, I swallowed my last spoonful of vomit. I was cured. With the caveat that every morning before breakfast, I needed to crank myself through 1.5 to 2.5 hours of yoga or risk a spectacular emotional catastrophe. Oh well. What’s a little yoga, right?

The Olympic Yoga Routine

I picked the sweatiest kind of yoga, the kind that left you with arms like a heroin junkie. Every 45 seconds entailed some sort of yoga push-up or airtime. According to tradition, we were supposed to learn one posture at a time, not moving on until we had perfected the pose and breath pattern. But in Montreal, it seemed we were all gifted children. After spending the last half of the ’70s practising yoga with his guru** in India, our teacher had taken a multi-decade hiatus from yoga to do things like work a day job and raise a family. Perhaps he was making up for lost time. He raced us through a series of face-to-your-shin forward bends, fold-in-half backbends, and trippy twists, all following a precise sequence designed to purify our organs and nervous systems. His wispy face glowed from under his wavy grey hair. Floaty and almost godlike, he was the perfect outlet for my daddy issues. I would clearly do anything he said. Soon I had this mammoth practice to wake up to. Sixteen different ways of putting your leg behind your head. Ten thousand ways of going upside down.

Karandavasana, or “A kind of duck” posture. I called it Mammoth Pose. A real highlight of the Olympic Yoga Routine, it begins upside down on your forearms. From there you fold into lotus and the lower down into this position as shown. At this point I would feel like a mammoth as my god-like teacher heaved me back up, grunting quite expressively every time. Spot-on image by my dear pal, Sara E. Enquist.

Diehards who read this will complain that I am focussing on the superficial aspect of the postures. That real yoga runs deep. An injury can even reveal stored karma in your body, from childhood or another lifetime. For example, once I hopped into bed with a Sensitive New Age Guy (SNAG), and as he glided his hand across my then chiselled abs, he said he had a vision that in a past life, I’d been a drill sergeant. My commander had humiliated me and this is why I experienced a pervasive sense of shame that would inevitably reveal itself throughout my sad and creaky body.

My lower back started to seize and seethe at some point between learning how to bend over backwards on my knees and grab my calves and putting both legs behind my head while seated upright and lifting my gaze to the ceiling.

“Oh, that’s so easy for you,” said my teacher as he pulled my arms toward the back of my knees. “But don’t expect to be able to do this when you start eating again. At the time, I was trying to cure my lifelong toenail fungus with an austere raw vegan food cleanse.* I’d lost too many pounds off my already fit and athletic frame. When I told him there were 45 days left of the cleanse, he urged me that this was too long. “There’ll be nothing left to you,” he said, before adding, “But you don’t want to get too fat either.”

Although I would eventually move far away from my teacher, I continued to practise with the same religious fervour. I got a day job teaching children to push in their chairs and wash their hands in French at a Montessori School. Getting to work on time meant that I had to wake up at 4 or 4:30 a.m. if I wanted to fit in my Olympic Yoga Routine. It didn’t occur to me to perhaps cut it down to a few sun salutations and consider my yoga to be chasing after society’s budding youth. My back pain radiated down around my left hip, which felt like it would slip out of place two to two hundred and twenty-five times a day. Every time I felt it jam, I would press the outside of my knee and resist until it felt like my ligaments and femur bone had shifted to a more reasonable position. The result was a horrendous clunk.

At Least You Can Walk

Seven years into practice—long enough for all my cells to replace themselves—I dragged my crooked, clicky, eighty-year-old spine to Mysore (now Mysuru), India where I spent three months practising with the guru’s grandson. I’d set my alarm for 3 a.m. so I could adequately caffeinate and eliminate in time to line up for premium real estate at the yoga shala.

Mysore was a blissful existence of spiritual pants and dosas and people who were as obsessed with yoga as I was. I had a sort of writing renaissance, and everyone loved my blog, The Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva. In the Shala, I was a star pupil, my face convincingly landing within a desirable distance to my crotch as the guru’s** grandson helped me fold over backwards and grab my calves. My hip didn’t usually start to click until 4 or 5 p.m. at which point I would rub coconut oil over all my crevices, eat a chapati and peanut butter sandwich, and fall asleep before nine so I’d be in prime shape for the imminent early dawn’s practice.  

“Don’t walk too much,” said the guru’s** grandson when people complained of pain. Poor guy had to wake up at 1 a.m. or midnight to get his practice in. He was clicking his fair share of joints, as were my fellow practitioners, between backbends and coconuts.  

Me and Sharath. So young!

**Me and my spiritual pants fortunately block the photo of “guru” Krishna Pattabhi Jois. Following the #MeToo movement, dozens of practitioners came forward alleging that KPJ committed sexual abuse and sexual assault, often while performing “adjustments” in the yoga shala. Sadly, his victim count may be as high as 30,000. You can read the account of nine women here in this Walrus article by Matthew Remski.

The colours and camaraderie of Mysore made me realize how lonely and stagnant my life felt in Halifax. When I returned, my life’s most beautiful blogging fairy tale was already fading. I thought maybe I could be one of those people who completed their pilgrimage to India every year, eventually acquiring the guru’s grandson’s blessing to crank other people through the sacred sequence. This would require an extra $900 per month, tough to scrounge up from a patchy combo of babysitting and early-career translation gigs.

Right after my trip, I had zero pain for more than three weeks. Maybe Mysore had healed me. Maybe I would figure out a way to make my life in Halifax work. Then I discovered that my ex-boyfriend, Simon (the one who came before the star of my life’s most beautiful fairy tale) had jumped off a building and died. We weren’t in impeccable touch, but we’d written a few aspirational books together. I vacillated over whether to attend his funeral.

In a purple notebook, I wrote, “If I earn an extraneous 1500 dollars, then I should go to Simon’s funeral.” A couple days later, I landed a $2100 contract translating an HR manual. But I figured the money would come in handy, especially if my blogging fairy tale unravelled. It was January in the tundra of Canadian winter. I decided not to go.

Two days later, my hip started to hurt again. By April, I’d left Halifax. While I was quitting my life, I decided I needed a break from my Olympic Yoga Routine. In my life’s great mythology, my yoga practice had always been the thing that stopped everything from falling apart. But I knew it was all going to fall apart anyways. And I wasn’t sure a series of rigid bending and twisting would help my cause. I was tired and my back hurt.

In my grief from the breakup, I walked to the ends of the earth. As my back and hip continued to scream, I had the clear sense that as long as I could still walk, I’d be okay. I experimented with different kinds of movement to ignite various chakras and stimulate my lymphatic system. But there was always a baseline quota of walking. It crept up over the years until walking became like a part-time job. By the time I disabled my health app, two waves into the pandemic, it wasn’t unusual for my daily mileage to exceed 15 or even 25 km. Every few blocks to every few hours, I would need to clunk my hip.

Being an Elephant in a Contemporary Dance Film, circa 2016

My Gay Husband and the Million-Dollar Chiropractor

“That doesn’t sound good,” my Gay COVID Husband said the first time the clunk echoed across the park bench to where he was sitting. “That’s not just going to go away. Your body will wait for you to deal with that.”

Among other redeeming qualities, my Gay COVID Husband was like meeting my lifelong fix-yourself project embodied in a refined and attractive middle-aged man. Ready for profound transformation, I would clearly do anything he said. He referred me to a Million-Dollar Chiropractor. “A miracle,” he called her. She would surely be able to help, with my hip and with my volatile emotional regulation system. I forked over a million dollars.

The Million-Dollar Chiropractor claimed that my childhood on the swim team had left me, “a fish out of water.” As a result, I had never properly adapted to gravity. She poked at different points along my body, reaching out to my highest self or soul. “It’s safe to exist,” she tried to convince my body. When I told her I had writer’s block, she suggested that I wake up every morning and ask the question, “What does it mean to be creative?” Also, “what does it mean to be submissive?” From my younger selves, she’d detected that I’d learned to be submissive from my parents’ rocky relationship and this was manifesting itself in my personal relationships.

Within a few months, my hip did start to get better. It’s hard to say if this was due to my million-dollar treatments or other radical lifestyle changes. I no longer walked as manically, and I’d swapped out my friend’s online push-up class with lying around on the floor with a yoga bolster. For years, I had regularly relied on Ryvita crackers and tahini butter as my main meal replacement, supplemented with bags of manky organic carrots from California. But my Gay COVID Husband prepared us elaborate lunches and dinners almost every day. I learned how to cook and consumed more cream and pizza and bacon than I had in my entire life. Under GCH’s influence, I also quit coffee and this plus regular eating meant that I was sleeping through the night more often than not for the first time since I took up Ex-Lax in grade 10.

(And if anybody’s worried or wondering, while I appear less sinewy and ravenous than I used to, I remain approximately the same size—biceps and all. )

Over the summer, my Gay Husband and I endured a rather extensive, sex-free lover’s quarrel. He recounted the ordeal to the Million-Dollar Chiropractor.

“Well, Erica is in love with you,” said the Million-Dollar Chiropractor, though I never said this. “She sees you as a partner.” There, she maybe had a point. But while I am the world’s least likely boundary expert, I am fairly sure this was the wrong thing for the Million-Dollar Chiropractor to say. I fired her. She was kind and lovely. I miss her, but now I have a million dollars.

And physically, this story has a happy ending.

People my age love to say, ever since I hit 30, my body has been so angry. As though our bodies are disappointed preschool teachers, waiting for us to apologize. With everything my body has been through, I would forgive it if it did not want to lug my forward head over the mountain, or make my erratic appearances to push-up class, or dust my shelves every Friday afternoon. But as long as I go easy on the push-ups (and the jump squats, and just go easy in general), it does not seem to mind. After 8+ years of clunking my hip several times a day to several times an hour, this is a low-grade miracle. Chronic pain has not been a death sentence, and neither has chronic overexercise. And neither has a professional eating disorder.

And yet, just when you think you’ve arrived at a liberated place in your recovery, there’s more freedom to reach for. More forgiveness. More corn chips. More rest. More love.

Written in April, 2022

*If ever you have the misfortune of pervasive toenail fungus, I do not dispense medical advice; however, after 20+ years of the most embarrassing toenails of life, I went on that drug everyone said would destroy your liver. It worked great, and I’m fine.