Shame X-ray
January 13, 2012
I’ve started with a chiropractor – lower back pain.
But the chiropractor tells me, isn’t about just pain, he is about wellness. I like the sound of this. Wellness is broader, deeper way of looking at health – whether physical or spiritual. Proactively pursuing an ideal is better than reacting to symptoms. “But,” he reassured me, “we’ll treat the sciatica too.” OK – I am deciding on a deeper wellness.
The first step is an x-ray of my spine. I sit still, the machine whirs and clicks – no big deal. At the next appointment he teaches my wife and I what a healthy spine looks like; curvature, alignment, etc. He exhibits x-rays of other people, ghostly, black and white portraits. You really feel like you’re getting to know someone when you can see the shadows of their internal organs. One person had a rod in their back. I sat up straighter.
“We’re looking for an angle of 31 degrees,” he points at the upper portion of someone’s neck.
After this, he takes us to the exam room to study my x-rays. I’m feeling OK at this point, even curious. After all, I’ve seen x-rays before… of my teeth or my leg… but this took a different turn. He wedges the 11 X 17 film into place and switches on the light. And there I was. Yes, there I was.
I stood for a closer look, but immediately regretted it. The profile image was near life-sized and at my eye level. I was staring into the left side of my skull, my earless and hairless skull, supported by a chain of strikingly thin and fragile neck vertebrae. The sensation was that of inspecting a cadaver or maybe identifying a corpse. Blue lines and notations punctuated the film. I noticed the angle, the one he had just taught us to look for - ’10 degrees’. All this, I took in before he cleared his throat. All this, lodged awkwardly in my throat – my shadowy, boney throat – off by 21 degrees.
I nodded intelligently, aware of my cervical vertebrae shifting, tilting, possibly grinding. I wasn’t breathing and felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. This surprised me and I fought some panic (that I might actually become sick), which was followed immediately by embarrassment. Nonchalantly, I sat down, as if I had taken in all the data. I could hear the Chiropractor and my wife talking above me. I was still nodding, but internally, I was askew.
And then I realized. All these sensations; defensiveness (‘that measurement is just wrong’), guilt (‘mom tried to tell me about my posture’), fear (‘my gosh, I’m like everyone else’) and nausea. These sensations, like a beaming, searing x-ray – exposed a bone-deep reality inside of me: shame. At the core, I feel shame.
Those x-rays show me how naked I am. And when I see my nakedness? I am ashamed of my deficient angles; angry about my fragile neck; embarrassed by dark shadows in my bowels, guilty about my arthritis. Oh, I see it now. At the core, I am deeply ashamed of my mortality.
So where do you go for such a bone-deep sickness? Is there wellness for this?
