A measure of risk

on overcoming fears and how to wear socks

It is a strange thing to sustain an injury as an adult, especially one incurred while doing something fun. When we were kids, someone was always getting hurt — falling off the monkey bars and breaking an arm, wobbling into class on crutches the Monday after a soccer tournament, getting bitten by the wrong kind of spider on a camping trip. Someone always had a plaster cast covered with Sharpied doodles and signatures. Rarely is anyone surprised when a kid gets hurt in the act of being a kid. We expect a kid to play, to enjoy the fast and nimble instrument that is the human body before it gets slow and arthritic. And with any kind of play comes a measure of risk.

I never had a plaster cast or crutches as a kid, possibly because I never felt my body to be fast or nimble, not in comparison to the bodies of my peers. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where football was king. It wasn’t quite Dillon, Texas, but close. Everybody played sports, or at least tried. Sports — that was how a person was supposed to use their body. I played volleyball and basketball in middle school, and I attempted volleyball and cross-country in high school. I didn’t hate any of it, but I was very bad at it, and there was not a single second in which I was unaware of that fact. I, age 43.5 years, can still rattle off the names of the girls at my school who were good at sports, because they were the girls everyone watched and remembered. I have no doubt that growing up was as horrible and fraught for them as it was for the rest of us, but back then, I was mostly awed by the social currency their athleticism bought them. I was awed and cynical and envious. It seemed that the only way for a body to be good, to be of use, to be worth celebrating, was if it could run fast and had good aim, and though I knew this perspective was dumb and narrow and totally wrong, I still sort of believed it. In middle school, I studiously watched the way the athletic girls positioned their white crew socks to achieve the desired look, positioning the cuff of the sock at exactly the right point along the calf to best emphasize the curve of the muscle there¹, the ideal of the all-American leg.

Of course, it wasn’t like I doing nothing with my body. I was riding horses. It was plenty physical: my thighs would burn after lessons without stirrups; there were scars up and down my legs from breaking in leather chaps or boots or riding in the wrong pants in the wrong weather; I got the wind knocked out of me, sand in my mouth, and dirt in the creases of my neck. But I never felt like an athlete, not like the “real” athletes among my peers.² After all, the word for a person sitting atop a horse is rider, a role that sounds as sedentary as a passenger on a bus. I never thought about how strong my body must have been then, when I was riding multiple times a week, negotiating the weight of a large animal around and through a series of obstacles. I was good at riding, but I knew lots of riders better than I was. I approached every show with a queasy mixture of excitement and anxiety, wanting to win but rarely able to muster the clarity, confidence, and agency of a competitor, of someone who believes they can win. We’d be cantering around a turn, let’s say, heading for a jump several strides away, and I could gauge the distance well enough to see that we were going to arrive at it awkwardly, too close to the jump or too far away, but instead of doing something to fix the error — asking the horse to lengthen or shorten his stride — I’d freeze up, forget that I had any control over the outcome.