Member-only story
Waking Up to the Perfect Body
Why I hid my collapsed lung
The first time my lung spontaneously collapsed, I was 21 years old.
What I didn’t do: tell anyone.
What I did do: completed my orientation for my wilderness ranger summer internship with the US Forest Service.
Climbed an Appalachian fire tower.
Got halfway through the CPR section of wilderness first aid training before reluctantly telling my boss that there might be something wrong with my body.
There were reasons, of course, that I didn’t speak up. For one thing, I was the smallest of the wilderness ranger interns, a 5-foot twig of an English major. I was the only girl. I wanted to prove I could keep up; I was anxious about appearing weak. A variant on the lesson bred into the bones of Southern women — don’t be an inconvenience.
But also, there was something more insidious at play. Which is that, as a girl grown up in America, I’d grown up with the understanding that my body was a failure. It wasn’t that I thought the searing pain in my left shoulder was unalarming. It’s just that my girl-body had been failing since I was old enough to be made aware of it by television, by magazines, by other girls. And then, of course, by myself. Wrists too knobby. Eyes too small. Legs too short. Philtrum too long.
(Here is the extent of the American woman’s self-scrutiny — Googling space between nose and lip is called? so that we can more thoroughly and accurately tear ourselves to shreds.)
We live in a world in which 92 percent of teen girls want to change something about their appearance; in which 53 percent of American girls are “unhappy with their bodies” at age 13, a number that grows to 78 percent at age 17. For me, it took landing in a hospital bed with a vital organ gone wrong to realize how right the rest of my body was.
America: we are doing this wrong.
We are teaching our girls to bury themselves while they’re still alive.
I was diagnosed eventually (after rejecting my male doctor’s suggestion that I’d “strained a muscle” driving three hours to the Pisgah Wilderness) with a minor spontaneous pneumothorax. This is a word with which I am now uncomfortably…
