My heart beats differently than yours, dear reader. This is not a metaphor–not a pretentious statement of uniqueness–my heart is weird. I have a condition called WPW; Wolff-Parkinson White. It’s an irregularity in the electrical functioning of the heart.
Instead of the standard path that impulses take through the heart, mine does a kind of loop-de-loop. I have an extra little fiber in there that steals the current, and redirects it momentarily. This puts me at risk for episodes of tachycardia–extremely high heart rate–that could cause the currents running through my heart to cross.
This could stop my heart.
Though I have never experienced an episode of tachycardia, and crossing currents are extremely rare, theoretically this could happen at any time. Because of this, a cardiologist recommended that I have my extra fiber extracted. Remove all risk, he said. In order to remove the fiber, they would put me under, stick a tube in my chest, and zap it.
I am a healthy young person, and I need heart surgery because I was born wonky. Of all the things I’ve done to my body, none of them have messed me up as much as something completely out of my control has the potential to. This news incredible to me.
But the more I thought about this, the more I realized that this is a painfully obvious truth.
We are vulnerable to everything outside our tiny sphere of influence. This is why we cling to control so desperately; this is why we drink; this is why we starve; this is why we numb.
If we allow ourselves to feel it, however, vulnerability is both terrifying and incredibly rock and roll. Like that bus wants to hit me? Nothing I can do. My heart wants to stop? Literally helpless.
I was BORN vulnerable, and so I often choose to live into this–not always in the wisest ways, but usually in important ones.
I’m not scared anymore, I’m more indifferent than anything. Numbness often wins. But when I live into it, when I acknowledge the danger–the fear, it’s good. It can be so good. I just want to be here, with the terror and the rock and roll and the feelings, as often as possible. I don’t want to live in the numbness that allows the world to keep on–that allows people to go on without feeling.
Hardly anyone looks inside; hardly anyone sees our vulnerability to pain and death as this beautiful thing. Once you do though, oh man.
I’ve written a poem about this feeling. It goes like this.
Maybe I’ll stay here
Where the days run
Together like so much
Water
Where floating feels
Like salvation
From the rest of it.
The rest of it–
Bound by land
Where once I stood
Toes curled under
Breath shallow
Waiting for some
Molecular difference
To make sense of me
But now it runs–
All of it. Gloriously.
Through my fingers.
God, how I love
To forget myself here–
Where Water bends
To make space
For my body
Where I have been carried
Just a little further past
My feet.
Girl Seeking Peanut Butter 