by
Sarah Polley
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The pain and sadness this left me with gradually twisted itself into anger. I started to see injustice everywhere. The technical crew, who generally showed me more compassion and kindness than anyone else on set, and who clearly had far more experience and expertise than the people they worked under, had no meaningful say in the show’s creation and were treated with noticeable disrespect by producers and some of the show’s directors. Many of the crew worked such long hours that they would talk about falling asleep and swerving off the road, or not seeing their children at all during the week because they left for work so early their kids were still sleeping and returned home long after they had gone to bed. I saw elderly background performers moved unceremoniously out of lunch lineups to make way for the show’s “stars,” including myself, after they had spent twice the time outside as everyone else, in thin period costumes, in sub-zero temperatures. Sometimes even the food they ate was different from ours, cheaper and less healthy. I became aware of a pecking order, one that I was near the top of, at least superficially. When I behaved in a bratty manner, no one held me accountable. But no one in charge seemed to care if I became so exhausted from work that I spiked a fever, or that I didn’t get time off after my mother’s death, either. Daily, I was fed a toxic concoction of coddling and neglect, which, unsurprisingly, did not bring out the best in me.
<3
After years of clearing the land and cultivating it, the settlers in PEI were still paying rents to absentee landlords in Britain. The Tenant League was formed to support farmers who began to refuse to pay their rents. When the sheriffs came to arrest those farmers, neighbours would blow tin trumpets to alert supporters across the countryside. Sometimes dozens of people would answer the trumpet calls and arrive to surround the farmer in question, preventing his arrest. Finally, British troops were called in, but most of them were Irish, and when they arrived many found themselves siding with the tenant farmers. Though the rebellion was ultimately crushed, and the history of the Tenant League remains largely unknown in Canada, it had a profound influence on the Island. To this day in PEI, the acquisition of land by non-residents is highly regulated.
hell yeah
Craniosacral massage and a nine-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program do offer some temporary relief from the headaches. I meet five other people in the meditation program who are suffering with long-term concussions. We get together once in a while to share notes and resources on the various fixes we have been exploring. One woman is really into cold laser therapy, even though she admits it makes her headaches substantially worse. It’s a motley crew, and, for the most part, fully half of us don’t show up to the get-togethers. We are either in too much pain or we’ve forgotten. (Note to self: the presence of a brain injury is not a good organizing principle for a social group.)
lol
“You froze when this happened. It’s a way of manifesting anxiety.” He looks me right in the eye and leans in close, as though he doesn’t already have every molecule of my attention. He says, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.”
I should now view my symptoms, he says, not as something to be avoided but as “opportunities” to increase my threshold of tolerance. I must learn how to run into the discomfort instead of away from it.
In order to fully recover, I require daily exposure to anything that has traditionally triggered symptoms or caused me pain. Grocery shopping, parties, screen time, driving, film sets, all of it. My avoidance of the things that have bothered me has made it more and more difficult for my brain to cope with them.
Though he has already (insanely) guaranteed me a one hundred percent recovery, I want to confirm the details. I ask him if I will ever make a film again.
He says, “Absolutely you will make a film again. I’ll put it this way. You’re not going to be totally better until you make a film again. Because that is part of what makes you, you. Right now, you are bartering between different areas of your life, and that must stop now. All areas are equal.”
“What’s with all the female filmmakers from Canada?” he asks. “What is going on up there?” He’s had a weird number of Canadian female filmmakers and screenwriters come down to his clinic with concussions. (Indeed, I myself now know at least four Canadian female filmmakers who have been to this clinic.) “The front desk keeps asking me what is going on in Toronto.”
I tell him that we’re a competitive bunch. The pool of female filmmakers is small, but even smaller is the pool of money to make films. We’ve taken to bashing each other over the head to put each other out of the running for the public money. Hence, more business for him, and an added bonus of appearing as the doctor character in lots of overly serious, low-budget movies that people will never see.
love her
Next I meet with Anne, the vestibular therapist, who gives me a series of exercises to do. I keep my eyes on my thumb as I move my head rapidly side to side, then quickly up and down. I throw a ball to her behind my back and as I move my head to look over the other shoulder she throws it back to me. We do this ten times. I feel dizzy, nauseous, and unable to believe that I am to do all of this every day for a month and a half. Anne reiterates what Dr. Collins has told me, that my main job now is to stop making environments accommodate me and to instead increase my tolerance of different environments. When I hit a moderate level of discomfort, it is a cue not to lie down and rest but to switch activities or exercise. Anne is kind, patient, compassionate. She watches me incredibly carefully as she assesses me and develops my program.
i believe this strongly
While I’m not a fan of men shouting at me or telling me to push harder—I’ve had enough of that in my life—I’ve also never been on a sports team or had a coach whose ultimate goal is for me to succeed, not only by pushing me but also by being there to help me get there. I’ve had plenty of critical exhortations from my family to just “push harder” and not be so weak, all of which have served to drive me deeper into the cave of myself, yet there is an exhilaration in feeling that someone is pushing me forward while rooted firmly on my side, offering support and expressing their unshakable belief in me.
im grateful that i can somehow make this for myself
I never miss a day of the exercises. I take the kids to school. I make dinner. I clean the kitchen. I try to do many of the errands David has done for the last few years, running to grocery stores, getting things fixed. I write. I socialize. When my children ask me to play, I say yes, no matter what, no matter how raucous the game. I write a screenplay. I sign on to direct a few episodes of a web series, keeping in mind the advice that I won’t get better until I do my job again, but mindful that I have a baby who I am not yet ready to leave for a longer project. I go everywhere I am invited, usually with the baby in tow. I’m in a kind of manic haze. It hurts like hell, I feel nauseous, and especially in those first weeks, I get the beginnings of what used to turn into crushing migraines. But when I feel those beginnings, instead of going to bed, I go for a fast walk on busy sidewalks or do an intense dynamic workout. By the time I am done, the headache has usually faded substantially. I learn to push through, and to have faith that I will feel better when I do so. In short, I learn to stop listening so attentively to my body. A friend who is cheerleading my recovery says to me, almost every day, over text or the phone, “This is hard, but you can do hard things.”
It’s strange, this paradigm shift. It’s hard for me to get used to the idea that this culture I’ve been steeped in of “listening to your body” and “self-care” has its limits. That’s not to say that it’s unimportant to learn how to do these things if you’re someone who doesn’t do them at all. But over the years I’ve been told, by pretty much every medical professional, every yoga instructor, every meditation teacher, to listen to my body more without anyone ever asking me how much I was listening already. When I listened to my body through my malfunctioning, concussed brain and it told me it couldn’t do things, I confirmed its limits. It heard, “You’re right. You can’t do those things.” I listened to my body. But my body listened to me, too.
When I first met him, Dr. Collins had said: “When you have a concussion, you don’t have good instincts about what will make you better. You want to lie in a dark room. You don’t want to be social. You want to drop out of your life. That bad instinct, coupled with bad advice, makes you much, much sicker than you need to be.”