"Calm down, it's nothing to cry about."

[toomuchplor]

I broke my wrist – just a little greenstick fracture, the kind that barely needs a cast – when I was 2 or 3 years old.  I don't particularly remember the accident itself, though I have a clear memory of the minutes leading up to it, and of the hospital plastering room afterwards, but my body remembers it.  I'm almost thirty years past that little minor fracture and to this day, when I'm upset, I feel it in the base of my throat as everyone else describes, but also as a painful random pulse of pain spiking up into my right thumb and down the side of my radius. 

I even associate the feeling with a sort of shameful self-pity, probably because I cried and whined a lot (too much, my parents say) as a little girl and was usually told that I was making a fuss over nothing.

[As an interesting aside, the same thing happened, I'm told, when I broke my wrist initially.  I fell off a piece of playground equipment, landed on my wrist, and wailed and carried on for minutes afterwards.  My older brother and I were in a summer play group, and even when he told the leaders with all sincerity that even his whiny baby sister didn't usually cry this much, the leaders in their wisdom told us both that I was fine and I should stop crying.  Eventually, I guess I did.  It wasn't until hours later, playing out in the back yard, that I took a second tumble – whiny and clumsy, I guess – and hit the same place on my wrist and screamed an unholy scream.  My mom came to take a look and found that my wrist was purple-black around the place it had been fractured.  Vindication!]

I don't think I've ever told anyone that before, but that's where I feel pain physically when I'm hurting emotionally.  Isn't it weird, the places our bodies choose to carry trauma?

Anyone have a weird thing they've never told to anyone before?  Anonymous comments turned on and IP logging off, if anyone wants to share without sharing their identity too.

Comments

[gozer]

I had glasses in Kindergarten, so I think my eyes were pretty badly off pretty much from birth.

I loved a talk given on the TED site by Oliver Sachs where he talked about perfectly normal, very vivid hallucinations that people who start losing their eyesight have... then he revealed that he, himself, suffered from them. Most people don't share because they're afraid they're going crazy, but apparently it happens to a ton of people.

So jealous of your LASIK! I went to see if I could get LASIK and was told I was a poor candidate.

I'll be someone told your niece, either teasing or in jest, that the monsters were coming, or she saw a cartoon that stuck in her head. Something definitely precipitated that reaction!

[toomuchplor]

I loved a talk given on the TED site by Oliver Sachs where he talked about perfectly normal, very vivid hallucinations that people who start losing their eyesight have... then he revealed that he, himself, suffered from them.

Huh, I've heard of that. A blind friend of mine who lost his eyesight gradually since childhood and has no vision now was telling me that he is constantly having "light shows" like flashes of colour and light even though his eyes aren't capable of seeing light anymore. Crazy!

[gozer]

How much crazier would it be if he saw 1/6-sized people dressed in old-fashioned clothing, like one of Sacks' patients. Sacks himself sees numbers and letters and checkerboards and funnels! He compares it to having a phantom limb.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/17/qa_with_oliver/

[toomuchplor]

Oh, and in answer to your other comment -- my mom is convinced she saw a kid being scared of the dark on a TV show, and that's where it came from. Who knows what goes on in their little heads, though?

[gozer]

Yep, that sounds right. If they identify with a character in a show, the character can influence them, for good or for ill. How do you get a kid to *stop* being scared in this instance? The question is, do you give her a nightlight or is it better to try to reason with her, or just let it lay and hope she gets over it eventually?