i broke my wrist (emotional)

Being greeted by sunshine (something I thought i’d never see again after 3 grueling months of NY winter), the excitement of watering budding relationships, and of course, the taste of delicious Julienkke was enough to keep me floating for weeks, until life, in the most inconvenient way possible, reminded me that it does not care how idyllic things feel.

I broke my wrist.

And not in a sexy, mysterious way either. Just a stupid accident that instantly changed the rhythm of my days (so basically a guy fell off a ladder on top of me, and that is actually pretty crazy). I I have never appreciated the function of a wrist more, moreso because I also never thought too hard about what purpose the wrist serves. I am at a loss, grieving the little acts that make up a life. These are the things you never stop to think about because your body has always simply done them for you. Some things that come to mind: folding underwear, dicing onions, opening soda bottles, washing dishes, buttoning jeans, shaving, which, if I’m being honest, has become a logistical nightmare (shoutout to my boyfriend who willingly stands outside of the shower to shave my left armpit), or writing the postcard I bought for my mom’s birthday that sits in my desk because even holding a pen feels unfamiliar.

You want your life to stay the exact same and then in an instant it isn’t. You spend time trying to put it back the way it was although you’ll never be able to — good or bad.

What has surprised me most is not just how frustrating it is, but how emotional it feels. There is something deeply humbling about suddenly needing help in places where you have always moved through life effortlessly. I find myself standing in my kitchen looking at a sink full of dishes or ingredients laid out for dinner and realizing that what was once mindless now requires thought, strategy, and sometimes asking for help, which is something I never want to do. Especially when I am trying to treat my beloved to a homemade dinner, and then he ends up doing 80% of the work himself anyway. I have spent weeks bargaining with myself, trying to outsmart my own limitations figuring out what daily objects I can balance on my cast (toothbrush while applying toothpaste), what I can wedge against the counter (green onions because they are long enough my fingers aren’t close to the knife), what things I am willing to postpone until tomorrow (this is the worst part, leaving dishes in the sink and clean laundry in the basket make me want to die a bit), and, on particularly frustrating days, wondering whether I can somehow rip this cast off myself.

Underneath all of that frustration, though, is grief, not for something catastrophic, but for ease. For the version of my body that carried me through my days without asking for acknowledgment. It has made me realize how rarely we appreciate the things that work exactly as they should until they don’t.

And maybe that is why this injury feels strangely tied to everything else I’ve been experiencing lately. Living abroad has already asked me to become comfortable with discomfort in ways I didn’t expect. I am trying to learn Dutch, though “learning” may be generous considering most days I feel like I have the language skills of a Flemish toddler (an insult to the toddler). What has been hardest is not necessarily being bad at it, but being afraid to be bad at it out loud. Afraid to mispronounce something, afraid to ask a question incorrectly, afraid to sound foolish. Somewhere along the way, I became someone who likes to know exactly what she is doing before she does it, which sounds wise in theory, but in practice often becomes a kind of paralysis.

I overthink. I research things to death. I spend too much time trying to find the best way to do something instead of simply beginning. And yet, breaking my wrist has made one thing painfully clear: sometimes there is no best way, there is only the way available to you, and you figure it out because you have to. You learn how to chop vegetables differently. You ask for help tying your shoes. You laugh at yourself when you can only open a bottle with your left hand and the grip of your bare thighs, or when your texts become absurdly formal because voice-to-text does not understand you. You check out at the store using the little bit of French you have, and accept you must switch to English when the man at the register goes off-script. Life keeps moving and you have to move with it.

That is what this season of my life is trying to teach me. Whether it is building a life in a new country and learning unfamiliar languages, navigating near-and-far relationships, or healing from an injury that has made me feel both fragile and resilient, the lesson seems to be the same, which is that I do not need to have everything figured out before I begin. I do not need to be good at something immediately. I do not need to think my way through every possible outcome before taking the first step.

I don’t know where I’ve lost that little part of me along the way, the part that never had to think so much through things and just did them because they needed to be done. Is it just getting older? Understanding the weight of consequence more? Simply insecurity?

But what I do realize is that I need to be willing to try, to fail a little, to accept help, to be uncomfortable, and to trust that I will find my way forward, even if it looks different than I imagined. And for now, that feels like enough.