Partway through grad school (my second time, but that’s another story), my back pain from sitting all the time started to slide from “annoying” into “despair”. Some years earlier I had read an entire book about chairs (The Chair by Galen Cranz) and my takeaway from that had basically been “human bodies aren’t meant to sit anywhere, in any kind of chair, for very long.” I had also read a lot about a mind-body technique called The Alexander Technique and became convinced it would help me solve my posture problem, and thus my back pain, and reconnect with my body.

I was living in Zurich, Switzerland at the time, desperately wanting to enjoy this Glamorous Ex-Pat Lifestyle, but mostly just speaking Hochdeutsch but never being able to understand the Schwiizerdütsch that came back to me, and everyone thinking I was Dutch, not American. Eventually I gave up and just spoke English all the time. I spent a lot of time being yelled at in Schwiizerdütsch (it isn’t only Americans who just yell louder in their own language when someone doesn’t understand them!).

I spent a while searching for an Alexander Technique practitioner who seemed nice and spoke English, and took about a year of lessons during the second half of my doctoral program. I have three main memories of those sessions:

• laying fully clothed on a massage table and the practitioner kind of running her hands down the outside of my arms and legs
• sitting in a chair or standing in front of the chair, with her repeatedly saying “There is enough UP!”
• admitting to myself that I was paying $150/hour for someone to be nice to me and actually provide physical contact with another human

The end result of all that was me impulsively deciding that the solution to my problems was just to find a career where I didn’t need to sit. Enter: a disastrous attempt at being a high school science teacher which is, also, a story for another day.

For years that phrase has echoed in my head as I observe myself slouching through life. There is enough up! There is enough up!

In 2021, at the age of 48, I was officially diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome 18 months after marching into my primary care doc’s office with the Dr. Alan Pocinki Article on HSD and hEDS.

A year later and I’ve finally found a PCP who knows more about EDS than me, and a physical therapist who specializes in EDS who immediately sends me out to get custom AFOs. I pick them up a few weeks later and pretend I’ll carefully follow the titration schedule during the adjustment period. I eventually find some shoes they will fit into (women’s size 13 wide! Yay me!), put then on, cook and do dishes (i.e. stand for an hour) and my entire pelvic floor seizes up!

Ohhhhh, these are actually doing something!

I realize that with them on I feel like I can actually kind of almost stand up straight? Like, if I straighten my torso (shoulders back!) that there is actually some “up” coming from my pelvic area! What the hell is that feeling!?

And then it dawns on me—is that the body my AT practitioner thought I had? One that had enough “up” in it if I could just break my slouching habit? HA HA HA HA HA!

In some ways that moment with my new AFOs released me from a lifetime of self judgement. My body literally does not have enough “up”!!! And my bad posture isn’t just a bad habit or some psychosomatic projection of poor self esteem (listen, sometimes bodily ailments are our psyches projecting stuff out into our bodies…but sometimes it’s actually our bodies and trying to read a secret meaning into every damn thing is tiresome at best and legitimately harmful).

My body doesn’t have enough up!!!

My ligaments and tendons do not provide the normal amount of “up”. I cannot just balance on my neutral upright spine. I must cramp up various muscles to imitate whatever posture I’m aiming for. This leads to all kinds of shit like migraines, and it also, bizarrely means I have weak and spasmy muscles.