“Invincible” by Anonymous Teen

I felt invincible as a kid. I would run and jump and dance and do it all so fearlessly that getting hurt was more shocking than painful. I was never the fastest or the strongest when doing sports, but it was okay because I would laugh when attempting to slide during kickball the same way I saw baseball players do. I slowly grew stronger, and by middle school I had discovered a love for volleyball. I wasn’t tall, I didn’t have the best reflexes, and I couldn’t even manage to serve the ball over the net from the correct distance. But none of that mattered when I got to slide and save what others thought was impossible, uplift our team’s morale, and take spur-of-the-moment risks. Then there was the pandemic.

With the pandemic came the slow decaying of my physicality due to my lack of exercise. Yet, I still tried out for the seventh-grade volleyball team. I was crushed when I was rejected, and chose to do cross-country because it was

the sport with the shortest season. My best time for two miles was 19:52, but I slowly became proud of what I had accomplished. I remember that I accompanied my dad on a morning jog one day and was able to outrun him, which then led to some slightly tearful reminiscing on his part about my growing up. I knew I never wanted to be an athlete; that didn’t stop feeling strong nor my smiling.

After cross-country, I essentially became a koala. Everyone always compares sloths to slowness, but I wasn’t even slow. I had simply dropped most physical activity. Hip-hop dance classes that met once a week and occasional bike rides with my dad began to become more exhausting, and the very idea of trying to play a sport as an extracurricular started to sound far less enjoyable than before. It was during this time that my body let me know exactly what it had felt.

It had started with a sprained ankle near the end of eighth grade, then spraining my other ankle near the end of ninth grade. I suddenly felt the crackling in my knees from years of bending low for volleyball, and stopped dancing because of their instability. Furthermore, my kneecap momentarily shifting out of place became a common occurrence. Anxiety around movement began to plague my life and affect decisions from footwear to hangouts.

The climax was when I tried to run for the first time in months at a friend’s party and suffered a more serious shift. Thus began my time in a knee brace for the rest of sophomore year and more physical therapy sessions than for both sprained ankles combined. I found that not only were the tendons around my kneecap weak and that there were pieces of cartilage floating in the area that had broken off because of my injury, but also that the very shape of my knee bones were not in the correct placement as a result of genetics. This overall led to a perfect storm for frequent injuries and a likely arthritis-filled future when I am in my twenties.

I was not very surprised, as I had suspected that there was something wrong given the constant instability, but hearing the news sent me spiraling. I knew it wasn’t the end of the world. I knew that physical activities were entirely possible. But the thought of how many precautions I’d have to take to ensure my safety evolved into what-ifs. What if I forgot to take a knee stabilizer when hiking and fell? What if I chose the wrong shoes for a dance and ended up slipping on the floor? What if I moved this way, twisted that way, did something just enough to the point where I would need much more serious medical care? This was only further exacerbated when the orthopedist mentioned that if an injury like this happened with my knee again then I could possibly need surgery. When I asked him why I was so prone to these injuries, he explained that it was a combination of the kneecap itself and my hypermobility.

I was initially confused and thought that he had misread something on my chart. I never considered myself hypermobile. The kids at school who said they were could do splits with no problem or bend their hand backwards until it touched their forearm; I couldn’t do either of those. Thankfully the doctor saw my confusion and explained that hypermobility was not a one-size-fits-all sort of trait. Hearing him rattle off other common signs had me thinking back to my childhood and some of the stuff I was able to do. The one that stuck out the most was wherever someone would kiss another's hand in greeting in fantasy settings, and thinking as a kid, Why do they never bend their elbows all the way out when extending their hand? Suffice to say there were a lot of missed signs that my parents and I had simply written off.

Time healed the injury to the extent that it could and frequent physical therapy sessions helped strengthen my legs as a whole. Yet, anxiety around my body still consumed me. I have always struggled with relying on others because of my “gifted” treatment in school and my parents’ perceived strictness. Independence seemed impossible to achieve if I couldn’t prove that I was ‘strong’ by doing things perfectly and on my own. I would panic frequently about nonexistent scenarios that ended with me being dragged through life by others and being a burden to their lives.

This line of thinking changed mainly because of therapy and hearing others’ stories. In therapy, I was taught techniques to stop both my spiraling and my believing that I was weighing others down by simply needing help. This was crucial to my way of viewing myself and improved my mental health greatly. What truly connected these teachings to my injuries started as a random rabbit hole through Instagram. I saw a funny reel and clicked on the content creator’s profile to see if they had created similar videos. They did make similar videos, but they also made videos discussing aspects of their life with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS). One thing that they made sure to emphasize in multiple videos was their annoyance with being treated as helpless by some and invisible by others. They stressed that simply existing in a way that requires outside support was not a moral failure, that equity was needed instead of equality, that visibility and resources should not be denied or restricted because of varying levels of support needed by each person with the same condition, and that no one is going to give you a medal because you refused help when you needed it.

Something in the way they said those words, their facial expressions, their gestures, just clicked for me. The unintentional internalized ableism that affected my perception of my body would not help me or anyone else magically feel better. There was no right or wrong way to live life, and I wasn’t somehow incapable of being independent just because I count on others. These teachings have influenced much of the way I view my future and my own capabilities, as well as how I view others’ capabilities. I don’t know exactly what is ‘wrong’ with me. But why should that stop me from leaning on those who are willing when I need help? I am not lesser for having support; no one is. Yes, I will have to take different precautions than some. Yes, I will never be invincible. But no one is. And that’s not a bad thing.