I think I broke a leg. Again.

Some days I try not to do it, breaking my leg. The last fracture hasn’t healed fully and now I’m off snapping another femur. It’s ok though, I have spares in my drawer.

It’s scary at first (breaking my leg). At first you can’t help but really wallow and sit there and feel all the Feelings that come with a fracture, a break, or a million million tiny microfractures that just piled up over the years and all of a sudden decided to just pop, just like that, with no warning. And now of all times, when you want to try a new thing or you want to work on yourself or your hobbies, the pain makes it impossible to do anything but sit.

Next is the fact that you’re stuck. You can’t move, you have a broken leg. You can try crawling, God knows I’ve thought of crawling on my belly, eating dirt and shit all the while I writhe like the worms in my compost bin. Writhing will stop you from looking around, because you’re too busy looking at the dirt and the piss and the shit that cakes the floor. It’ll stop you from looking around, looking at other people who don’t have broken legs and who’ve been running since they were five (I started in my late 20s, you see). It’ll stop you from feeling like shit for not being able to run as fast or as well or as long as a person that’s been running for twenty years compared to your two years. Some days I think what it must be like to be able to run for more than 30 minutes at a time, but then again fantasizing like that is unproductive, so I get to crawling.

The good thing about crawling while having two broken legs is that you keep moving, no matter how slowly. It’s about the journey, right? People always say it’s about the journey but then again people don’t have a sword hanging above their head, held up by a thin strand of old hair, taken from a clump in my drawer. People don’t have to think about swords, or hair, or broken legs, but then again nothing is making me think about swords, hair, or broken legs, but here I am, thinking about them. And now I’m writing about it. (Better to think about them here rather than bottling it up like some manosphere pseudo-stoic. I’m begging you to develop some critical thinking ability, ******)

The other good thing about crawling with broken legs and arms is that you’re too busy to look around to the sides, to compare yourself to other runners or maybe even other writhing worms like myself. It keeps me focused, the act of crawling, and I don’t really want to be too personally involved in other peoples’ professional journey since that’ll open me up to their personal journey too. The last time that happened I lost four years and seven months of my life trying to pick up the pieces and gluing what I loved back together, shaping it into some disfigured homunculus of what I once had. I learned eventually to throw it out and try to build something new instead, what I have right now is too fragile at the moment to let other hands touch it---God knows if other people will fuck with my new homunculus, setting me back again. I can’t afford to spend more time picking up the pieces. I’m tired of picking up pieces, unfortunate since other people don’t seem to be tired of always reducing my homunculus to component pieces. Again.

That experience taught me to be wary, extremely so. I tend to shut my door preemptively now so people don’t trawl in dirt and dust in my space that’s almost like a run-down bar with worms and termites and cobwebs and ghosts. I mean, it doesn’t mean that I don’t answer the door; only one other person knows the secret knock that lets me know that it’s them, I let them in. But most of the time I just let people knock and knock and knock---I pretend that I’m not home. But then again there are days, weeks, months, years where nobody knocks at all and I wish someone did so I can ignore it, instead of just ignoring nothing. This is wrong and stupid, and I know it, but I can’t help doing it.

Oh, I think I broke another leg. Again. It never stops, does it?