My body of skin holds the story of my life.
Skin holds memory the way the Earth harbors fossils. A touch becomes permanent. The day when I was six years old, walking home from school and recalling the nun had told us we could pray anytime, anywhere. I stopped and knelt on the sidewalk, closing my eyes, clasping my hands, and bowing my head as I prayed to Mother Mary. I don’t remember what I prayed for, but I can still feel the rough concrete of the sidewalk biting at the flesh of my knees, leaving them pebbled and raw.
The buttery softness of petals brushing my cheeks when I pushed my whole face into a rose. The needling of cool rain on my shoulders and arms as I plowed through the water at swim practice, the rain a stippling refreshment against my heated skin. A Pacific tide tugging around my ankles, as water and sand siphon out from between my icy toes. Heat from the cinder on the tip of a joint that bled through the thin rolling paper, singeing the fleshy petal tip of my upper lip. Tiny fish mouths tickling and sucking on my toes off Koh Tao. The thrill of icy water at midnight in the Mediterranean and midsummer in Tahoe, so tingling and vibrant, it felt like swimming in champagne.
Memory often stirs an ache of longing – for the beauty, the tenderness of sensation, the marriage of all the senses that shape a moment in time. I feel that ache more acutely now that I’m bereft of my sense of touch. A tumor in the center of my spinal cord nearly took my life, almost robbed me of my mobility, and in the end, nullified my relationship to touch as I knew it.
My body of skin is numb. I cannot sense a tap, a caress, a bug crawling up my leg – all go unobserved. Some planes of skin still sense temperature – I can feel the chill of the bathroom tile press into my bare soles, the seeping warmth of water in the shower, the freshness of foggy air against my neck – but my hands and arms are unperceptive of heat from the stove and oven, as the assortment of burns scars on digits and bruises on limbs will attest. I can sense pressure but not touch. I can sense gravity pushing into my bones, the pressure of a hug, but not the touch of skin-to-skin communion.
Such is the complex nature of our sense of touch – an umbrella term for a whole host of sensations carried by individual sense receptors from the skin to the spinal cord and finally to the brain where it’s deciphered. My spinal cord injury is designated as incomplete, which means I have limited sensation and curbed mobility. But I’m fortunate. My two-inch long tumor gave itself away when I began to misinterpret where my body was in space – I tumbled downstairs, fell in the street, dropped spoons, cups of coffee, my laptop. Then my hands went numb, along with my thighs, and once diagnosed, I learned that within a few months, the tumor would have further encroached on my motor nerves, rendering me fully paralyzed. Post-surgery, I lost the use of my limbs and had to relearn the basics – from turning over, sitting up, standing, to finally walking. I had to be fed like a baby until I could master the use of a spoon, and it would be months before I could use a knife and fork. And through it all, my skin felt next to nothing.
The injury on my spinal cord that prompted all of these sensory anomalies has also triggered nerve misfirings so severe; my skin feels like it’s on fire from the inside out. Like an aurora borealis of fire under the skin, with flashes of lightning down my arms and into my toes. Numb and burning. Fire and ice. Anesthetized and alight.
Up until I lost my sense of touch, I had not given sensation much thought. Unless there was irritation, pain, or pleasure involved, my consciousness around touch was fleeting in the moment. When my neurosurgeon explained the very real odds of dying or waking from surgery as a paraplegic, I tuned out as non-essential the bit about numbness. It didn’t matter in the face of paralysis or death. When I woke and discovered that I could move my big toes, I cried with relief; my bandwidth stretched to grasp that my skin felt nothing. And when it finally dawned on me that my skin was deadened to touch, my brain struggled to comprehend the absence. I could see the freckled skin of my upper arm resting against the light blue hospital gown, could hear the cotton rustle, and see it slide back and forth over my arm, yet my skin itself was blind. I felt untethered from my body until I recognized gravity at work, the pressure of my bones and blood and flesh held against the Earth. In the same way that I had to learn to roll over, stand, and walk again, I had to learn a new consciousness around numbness. Of both the body and the heart.
***
Science tells us that the first sense that develops in the womb is our sense of touch. Of course, those initial splitting cells have no means of deciphering the sensation of buoyancy and fluidity as they grow and develop. But when skin meets the world at the moment of birth, it begins to interpret the terrestrial, post-womb reality – for me, this is where consciousness begins. Touch kindles our nascent sense of self-awareness, quickening our cognition that we live. From the moment of birth, touch is the all-encompassing motherboard that tells us we are safe and loved. Skin itself is the original swaddle, coming alive with alarm and acquiescing to comfort. It crawls and tingles and shivers, mirroring our emotions – blushing with embarrassment, heating with desire, chilling with grief, and glowing with joy. And of all of the senses, and of all of the body’s organs, touch and skin never sleep.
Most of us learned that our skin is the largest organ of the human body in a middle school science class, a fact that is difficult for a pre-teen mind to grasp. It’s just skin. It’s this mundane sleeve of cells that makes contact between our personhood and the world. It’s the body we’ve always known and the only organ that we can ever see without the aid of a mirror. We rarely think about or talk about skin outside of the context of beauty or race. How youthful skin looks can determine our value. And one of the greatest human failings is that the color of one’s skin determines the level of one’s freedom, safety, and security. Skin – its textures and colors – tells the story of peoples, of cultures, of entire civilizations. But the mundane and miraculous fact is that it is an organ – like the lungs, the eyes, and the heart. It compresses all of our flesh into a cohesive mass, holding our body together in an unfailing hug. Without it, we’d be but a viscous heap of tissue, bone, and blood.
Taken a step further, skin provides the vessel for consciousness in our planetary state. Embraced as we are by gravity, we are given a functioning body to interpret the world and ponder our own beingness. And so skin, marvelously taut and soft, loose and compressed, smooth and crumpled, in myriad shades of richness, is the master key to our earthly experience. Sight and hearing seem ubiquitous in our sensory palette – we hear and see, and we believe – but we don’t really know until we touch. We sense the world through our flesh – we feel vibration, texture, warmth. And emotion reverberates through the body through the skin—the chill of fear, the heat of anger, the tenderness of love. Skin translates the stories of our lives through nerve endings and accompanied by sight and sound, smell and taste, we make a sense memory, and from there our life’s story unfolds.
Of all the senses, touch is the mother. Touch soothes. Touch cradles and comforts. Touch is the sense that offers proof of connection and a sense of rootedness. Mothers touch their babies – all mothers – humans, elephants, cats and dogs, whales – mammals and invertebrates alike. Depending on the species, mothers hug, nudge, lick, or shelter their babies who long for physical connection, in fact, need it, to thrive. It is not enough to see or hear – we need to feel a physical connection, a reassurance communicated, body to body.
Touch awakens us to our existence from the first moment we draw breath. Even as we are exiting our mother’s body, we sense the post-womb world – air breathing on the crown of the head, the pressure of a hand as the infant is guided into the world. Moments after we are born, we make the connection that food comes from the sensation of lip to nipple, skin to skin, sensation without, and within. Nipple to lips – that sensation defines sustenance and safety. The shock of birth and the vastness of the world outside the flotation of a dark, warm womb are indecipherable to the infant mind. Touch provides there-ness. Skin to skin sensation soothes is a physical testimony of love and provides a sense of belonging in a way that no other sense can provide. Touch is knowing. Touch is its own consciousness. Consciousness made into flesh.
Touch is holiness.
Touch is the mother.
Touch is a constant, whether we are conscious of it or not. Walking down the sidewalk, one feels the contact between the foot and the shoe and the shoe with the concrete. We feel it on the skin, sliding against the sock or a bare sole sticking to the insole. We feel it in the jarring pressure of each step, in the knee joints, in the thud of vibration into the hips; we feel it in our flesh and our bones. Even while asleep, we feel. Sight, sound, smell, and taste recede into unconsciousness, and while sensation rests, it does so with one eye open. We feel a full bladder. We feel too hot and kick off the covers, or feel cold and snatch the covers back. And all the while, gravity maintains its pull on our bodies, letting us feel the constancy of Earth. Touch says, ”You belong. You are here. Feel the connection.” Like the ultimate umbilical cord. While sight and sound come in waves and seem like magic, touch provides the tactile evidence of our being on the planet.
I feel, therefore I am.
***
My first memories are of sensation:
Cool azalea-starred shade.
Pink baby toes curling and uncurling in baby tears, a springy, cool carpet of tiny green petals, tickling.
Dark, damp loam. Rosy baby, lush Earth, sun-dappled cool.
Two or three years old, post-nap, overheated, and cranky. Padding down a wool berber carpet, knobbly and scratchy against the tender, chubby soles of my feet. Looking for the cool comfort of my mother’s lap. Stumbling into the kitchen, seeing the back of my father standing at the sink in a white undershirt and long white silk boxer shorts, fiddling with something on the kitchen counter, the back of his neck a creased and angry pink. The linoleum smooth on the soles of my feet, backing silently out of the room.
Outside safer than inside. Foggy wind lifting and curling my hair. A sun-dappled lawn. Hydrangea bushes underneath my bedroom window bloomed lavender, blue, and blush but weren’t dense enough to conceal a crouching four-year-old. Rhododendrons best for camouflage – cool, shadowed cover in that corner of the yard. Flowers scarlet and sticky, green leaves so dark they were almost black, and the sweet scent of leaf mold and mud a balm.
Not long out of diapers, I became a stealth child, almost undetectable. There were days when the tension in our house prickled – an itchy wool-sweater kind of irritation that kept me from alighting anywhere to play or read – my father would seethe, “get these goddamn kids out of my sight” as my mother would jump to corral or spank the noisiest among my five siblings. I would scuttle away, down the back stairs that wound around to the house’s lowest level, to the red painted, concrete-floor-corridor that led out to the side yard. The washing machine and dryer lined the passageway and filled the bottom of the house with a soapy rattle, while a linty warmth hung in the air like a blanket, calm and soft. The light through the window was diluted and thin where I slipped in between the dryer and the wall, sank onto the cold floor, and waited until the coast was clear. I breathed short, shallow breaths, whispering to myself, “be good, be quiet, be good!” But most of all, be invisible.
Every memory is a sense impression, a footprint in the sand of the mind’s eye. The body itself holds memories. The scent of a Meyer lemon takes me back to my grandmother’s kitchen garden, to the damp soil and the sagging branches of the lemon tree that bordered the roses, all of the scents harmonizing into a sleepy, sun-drenched afternoon memory. Or the taste of Good and Plenty – the brittle candy cover that crumbled at the first bite followed by warm, syrupy black licorice – plunks me down into the red velvet seats of the Fox Theater on Burlingame Avenue watching The Sound of Music. Or that moment every year when the sunlight shifts from its summer bold to a watery softness of autumn, and I am reminded of my sisters and how we call each other when we see the light shift. Or whenever I hear a Steller’s jay squawk, I’m transported to my aunt’s backyard, the patio sticky with fallen, rotting apricots and my aunt sighing “damn birds” under her breath.
The sound of that squawking bird takes me to a place rich with sense impressions – the scent of roses and eucalyptus, the hum of the bees hovering over the rotting fruit, the vibrancy of the fuchsias, the freshness of the shade. Sight, sound, scent, and taste take me inside my head – but memories of touch live in my skin. Like the sandpapery-soft scratchiness of my aunt’s patio, so much more comforting than the hot and gummy black asphalt of the driveway. Like my big toe – stubbed continuously as a child – the skin punched back, raw and bloody, and air uncomfortably fresh on the scraped flesh and the juice of those same rotting apricots on my aunt’s patio, sticky and tugging at my barefoot. Like the satisfying softness of the just-ripe apricot between my thumb and forefinger, warm from the sun, juice trickling down my chin.
Like my cheek – my right cheek to be exact – younger and plumper and pinker, no more than five years old. The air is chill against it, and the room is dark; I’m lying on my side in bed but not asleep. My knees clutched into my chest. My shoulder hunched close to my lips, close enough for me to lick the saltiness from that curve of skin, over and over, warm tongue, cool patch of wet skin, over and over, attempting to soothe. The round nubbiness of the white cotton chenille bedspread tucked under the soft flesh of my arm puts me on edge. The quiet of the house presses around me, disturbed only by the tread of heavy feet on the hall carpet. A wedge of light expands over my bed. My jaw tightens, the pressure from clenched teeth becomes a sharp-edged ache. My back is to the door, but I know his shadow blocks a chunk of light from the hall. I hear his short, angry breath before I feel it. The thump of his knee jostling the bed and his spitting a whispered “damn it” into the dim space of my bedroom. He kneels on my mattress, wobbling, catching his balance. He is heavy, and my bottom dips a little into the hollow made by his knee. The bed frame shakes as he grabs the headboard, painted a lacquered white with scrolls of pink and purple flowers, the twin of my sister’s bed behind me, behind him. His right hand slaps and hits my legs and thighs, and bottom. A heavy, fleshy hand. He leans over as he gets tired, and I feel his hot breath on my cheek, breath that raises the short downy hairs on my plump, five-year-old face. Breath sharp and sweet with bourbon from the quart of cocktails he’s drunk. The pain of the slaps has dulled in memory, but the sensation of his breath on my cheek lives on and curdles my stomach nearly sixty years later.
I learned early on that I was not safe – not at home, not at school, not with parents, nor with siblings, nor with supposed friends. Beaten up in bed. Lined up with my siblings on the back porch, waiting to receive the white-hot lashing of the eucalyptus switch against the back of my plump, tender calves and thighs. My mother standing to the side in dull light, saying nothing. Complaints were not tolerated. My fears belittled. So, I took my pain and tucked it away. Plastered a “good girl” smile on my face. Escaped into the tall, chalky-gold grass at school. Hoping it would provide camouflage and protect me from the viciousness of classmates. Retreated to the shadows in the back yard or escaped the house to walk the neighborhood alone to flee the heat and anger that seared me at home. I isolated myself from family members, mistrusted those who extended a hand in friendship. Numbing my pain, tamping it down, only made the flashes of fury and despair all the more destructive. Deeply sensitive, I took everything as a barb or a threat, but because it was unsafe to express anger or anxiety, I bottled all of my emotions up. I didn’t talk about the pain in my heart, but instead, made everyone suffer for it when I eventually exploded with martyred fury.
I learned that my pain was a source of annoyance, and some days, was a catalyst for abuse. The worst of these came on a summer afternoon. I tried to stand on a basketball, and, of course, I crashed down to the asphalt and heard a bone break. My mother responded with fury, sent me to my room to writhe alone, and go into shock. She was undeniably and understandably overwhelmed by what life had handed her. Having divorced my violent, alcoholic father, she had to cope with the unbearable pressure of raising six children alone in the 1970’s on a teacher’s salary, depending on food stamps, stifling her own grief and rage over the unfairness of her circumstances. I get it. Her burden was unendurable, yet she endured. She did the best she could with the emotional tools she had – she kept us all housed and fed and together. And it left her hollow, submerged, and at times, bitterly resentful. And having someone latch onto you while drowning makes you fight even harder for your own survival.
But I was eleven years old.
And her fury wrecked me.
Afraid to cry or complain again, I lay on my bed, ill with nausea and suffering the throb of pain of every heartbeat. I lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sun to set, for my room to go dark, so I could at least cry without anyone seeing. I felt some consolation when my older sister, Mary, snuck into my room with a glass of water and some Bufferin stolen from my mom’s medicine cabinet. She placed a cool washcloth over my forehead and stayed with me until I went to sleep. Numbing myself to pain the following morning, I tried to look grateful for the dishtowel my mom handed me to make a sling and headed off to school. That afternoon, she took me in for an x-ray and was suitably mortified that I indeed had a broken collar bone. I’d fake-smiled my way through it all – it was a survivor skill I’d learned before I went to kindergarten. And I now recognize this incident as the singular moment when I closed off completely – took the pain in my heart and spirit and sealed it off. This experience taught me that I was not worthy of love or care or compassion. I no longer trusted anyone who said, “I love you.” I built up walls that kept everyone at a distance. Stayed in abusive friendships and relationships because, of course, that’s how I should be treated. Let anxiety and self-loathing corrupt my spirit and psyche to the point that I had panic attacks so severe; I found myself in the emergency room on multiple occasions convinced I was dying from a heart attack.
The year I turned 50, I sensed that a change was coming. I knew it in my gut. I intuited that my life was about to change in ways I could not fathom. I was excited for it, felt open to all of the possibilities that awaited me. Nothing could have prepared me for the diagnosis of cancer – the two-inch-long tumor growing in the center of my spinal cord – what my neuro-oncologist called a “benign malignancy.” A suitable paradox for the emotional state I’d been living in and the reality of what was to follow.
Numb and in pain.
***
Post-surgery, I had to lie flat on my back for a week to allow my brain and spinal fluid to regain equilibrium. I lay staring at the ceiling, counting the holes in the tile, unable to feel my body, learning to translate how gravity felt. I wasn’t paralyzed, but I couldn’t make my limbs translate the messages from my brain and move. I could do nothing for myself. I’d been reduced to an infant state. It was the ultimate do-over.
My sister Mary visited me in the evenings, feeding me soup and applesauce as I lay supine, then wiping my chin of the inevitable dribbles. She read articles to me from Vanity Fair magazine as the room grew dark, and the sky outside my window changed color at sunset. One night, she asked me what I thought it all meant – what I thought I was supposed to learn from it all. It was a question I had been pondering since I was diagnosed. After a few minutes, I answered – “I think it’s about love. I think it’s about opening my heart, receiving love, and trusting it.” I don’t know why I thought this – don’t know where this notion came from. But all of my walls were down and my heart found its voice. And so, the process of un-numbing began just as I was coming to grips with the numbing of my body of skin.
My spinal cord injury has been a teacher whose greatest lesson has been numbness. It gave me a mirror into which I had to look with an unflinching gaze. Thin-skinned, I walled my heart with stone, thinking a fortress would keep me safe. I chose the wrong men until I chose to be alone. I over-worked on purpose and basked in self-made martyrdom. I cried from loneliness but rejected the company of others. The force field of energy I extended around me was like the glass bowl of a snow globe. I could participate in my life but from a distance. I could see all that was going on, appear to be in the thick of it, but my barriers shielded me from making deep connections.
I understand numbness, have lived under its muffling weight, used it all my life as another sleeve of being. Numbness has been my savior, a thick, grey wad of lint, padding every experience, diffusing pain, anger, joy. And love. I never believed that I was loved, could be loved. Didn’t trust it when someone said it…even my mother. I didn’t feel it. And when I thought I loved another, it felt more like longing, the way a thirsty person longs for water. I was parched but declined to be slaked. Mistook the thirst for something I was not entitled to. Numbness will do that. Numbness hijacks deep emotions at the root. Smothers them before they have a chance to rouse.
Numbness was my barricade against the terror and beatings by my father, against the bullies that tormented me into hiding, against the verbal slashings by my mother. I felt there was no safe place for me on planet Earth. So I curled in on myself. I put on a mask. Grew accustomed to the sharp recoil from real emotion. And that numbness did paralyze me.
After the surgery, completely immobilized and my skin numb from chest to toe, I knew I had to excavate for my self, find a live ember to rekindle some kind of authentic identity, one that could sustain me through four surgeries, six months in the hospital, the loss of my work, the loss of my home, and the permanent loss of my sense of touch. I was already numb when I lost sensation. Numbness squared. Something had to give, or else I gambled with being extinguished altogether.
Unlearning numbness – deconstructing the walls, unpacking the layers of emotional padding – comes with searing pain, not unlike the lightning that arcs under my skin, the constant burning all over my body akin to the shroud of fear and trauma and hurt and desolation that had seeped into my being from my first memories as a child. The irony never fails to escape me. My skin has taken on the burden of numbness and pain while I claw my way out of the suffocating bulwark that lies between me and deep human experience. Learning to feel and to trust takes the same kind of patience as learning to walk—one step at a time.
It’s relatively easy to live without sensation. Unlike the loss of sight and sound, loss of touch does not interfere with communication or interacting in the world. It affects only me. Anesthetized skin, like numbness of heart and spirit, is an affliction solely my own. It affects my spatial awareness and therefore, my already precarious balance. Being numb is an irritation, an inconvenience. It’s alarming to see burn blisters from the stove or bruises from bumping into furniture, but I felt nothing at the time. The most taxing is the nerve pain that makes me feel like I am being incinerated from the inside out. I sometimes imagine unzipping my skin, stepping out of my body, and letting it relax on a hanger like a tired, lank costume, all the while watching electrical storms shock through the webbing of nerves under the skin, imagining they’d look like lightning storms as seen from above the clouds – like those videos from the space station that show the erratic pulses of light behind the cloud curtains, the skin of the atmosphere alive with energy, jolted and singed by electric cracklings across its surface. If only my body had its own cooling system, oceans to disperse and extinguish the fiery blasts.
It has been a decade of revelation and transformation, but one truth has been made abundantly clear:
Numbness is a thief, allowing for only a half-life.
Emotional healing and resiliency encourage a more full-throated life, one with richness, and depth of experience. What I’ve learned is that it takes courage, so be tender. It takes strength, so rest and recover. It takes honesty, so find humility. It takes time, so have patience. It will hurt, so weep when necessary. It will bring clarity, so let that fresh light fill you. It will spark regrowth, so be kind and nurture yourself. It takes work, so make a plan and make the effort to nourish the new shoots of self. There will be healing, so allow yourself to feel joy.
***
I was born and continue to live on the edge of the continent, close to the water, in the fog belt of San Francisco. It’s cool here. Cool and grey and green with silver flashing off the ocean. I can feel the blue freshness on my cheeks, feel the speckling wetness from clouds that plop their plump bodies down here on the western fringe of the city. I open my windows to the fog and the rain when it comes, to better feel the air like a freshet against my neck. Sensation ends at the loose collar that circles my throat, the chilly air glazing the skin over my cervical vertebrae, seeping into my hair, curling into my ears, and funneling into each nostril. Cool air feels like a deep pool, where I can float weightless, where I can imagine my skin’s prism gliding from searing pink to the liquid bell of aquamarine at the prism’s heart. I’m always going to feel the pain, in my body and in my memory – my skin and psyche both reservoirs of sensory imprints – and what I’ve learned from dulled hush of numbness and the arcing fires of pain is that at the core of it all is the heart. The heart that soothes the bruised ache of shame and hot tears of suffering. The heart that seeks beauty as a balm. There is a re-greening emerging over the scorched and frozen planes of my heart. Heart earth – loamy, sun-dappled, mist of emerald emerging against the azure. I can make new memories here.
__________
Theresa Padden has an M.A. in Literature from San Francisco State University. She is a retired high school English teacher and lives in San Francisco, California.