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…
