Advertisement

Supported by

Pamela Paul

By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

During a recent group email for my book club, one member said she couldn’t make the next meeting because she’d accidentally frost-burned her rear end with an ice pack meant to soothe a strained muscle. That’s nothing, a second member replied, describing a friend who’d thrown out her back sneezing on the subway. “It seems to be the season for silly but painful injuries,” she wrote.

The runway thus cleared, it was impossible not to own up to my own debilitating excuse. After sitting with a cat on my lap for over an hour, I’d managed to tear my meniscus while uncrossing my legs, I wrote, hitting send before I could add a single exculpatory detail. For a month, I’d been enhancing this story with a preamble about going on a 15-mile bike ride beforehand, mumbling some nonsense about overly loosened muscles. The unvarnished truth was that I’d hurt myself trying to stand up. There was no valor to be found here.

The human body has all sorts of ways of getting hurt and just as many ways of thinking about those injuries. There are minor bruises and major mishaps. There are injuries visited upon one’s body by someone else and those that are self-inflicted. Deliberate wounds and accidental injuries. Active and passive ways to subject oneself to pain. Like many writers, I tend to think of injury in terms of the kind of story it tells: comedy or tragedy, a tale brave........

© The New York Times