About the Project: Čudnata

Coping: to deal effectively with something difficult.

Escaping: to break free from confinement or control.

 

My entire life I’ve trained myself as an escape artist---that is, not the art of physically escaping, but carefully escaping my brain by any means possible. I have trained myself for nearly 22 years to believe that the act of coping works synonymously with the act of escaping. If I was feeling sad or mad? I would dance. I loved the way that dance allowed me to take on a persona that didn't necessarily have to be my own, a gateway to a world I was allowed to be a stranger in. Dance has gotten me through some of the most ugly, but also some of the most beautiful times in my life, and dance has inevitably saved me from myself. A murmur of “I’m fine,” built the ladder, and the choreography allowed me to climb right out, escape as quickly as I could. Though I’ve personally morphed the meaning of coping and escaping as exactly the same, are they?

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I was always flagged as a "high writer" in school. In third grade, I wrote a story about a Christmas candle (I'm not sure, don't ask questions) in a beautifully spaced, cursively written and cardboard cover bound booklet. I never got it back because my teacher kept it as an example for years to come. In high school, I was recommended to take all Honors and Advanced Placement English classes. I would never say that I thoroughly enjoyed writing 10 page essays, but I learned to enjoy writing simply through the art of being "good" at it. I pursued the Minor in Writing in the beginning of my sophomore year of college, with the goal of strengthening my Language Arts endorsement within my Elementary Education major. I wanted to be able to use my writing skills for good, to help someone else learn to enjoy it as much as I have. In the last two years, the minor has evolved into something much more than that for me. 

 

On July 1st, 2017, I broke my spine in Pehčevo, Macedonia. My T12 vertebrae, specifically. I laid flat on my back for 13 days in the hospital, and now I have a few handfuls of hardware holding my back bone up. At the time, I was thinking I was invincible, a miracle for still being able to walk, so I had to be fine, right? And I convinced myself that I was. "You don't know how lucky you are," people would say. To me, my "luck" ensured that in a short month when I would return to school, I would be back to normal, continuing my last year of college with my dance group, allowing myself to flee from the thought of everything that had happened in the summer. Not quite. I went from being a dancer to a full time back brace model, quite literally being held within my own body. And let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to escape when you feel like you're no longer in control. It’s hard to escape your own brain when your list of activities exclusively includes staring at the three blank walls of your hospital room, thinking about how you can’t escape. You can’t really forget about anything that way.

 

When I was finally released from the hospital, I started a Google document. It began as a play by play of each day of my Birthright Macedonia trip, the one I had prematurely been calling the "trip of a lifetime,"—the day I flew in, the time I got lost taking the bus to the orphanage I worked at, and the nearly 100 degree heat that caused me to sweat through all of my clothes every day. Even the night two of my friends and I stayed out late walking around the city laughing till the early hours of the morning, though we knew we had to be up early for the bus the next day. But from July 1st on, my play by plays turn into bulleted lists of things I thought I’d eventually get to, but never did. I wanted to forget about it, not relive it. 

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Now, five months post-accident, I have engaged in the most mentally and emotionally draining work of my whole life. With dance being out of my framework of capability, and hosting a whole lot of pent up emotion within me, I decided to root my Capstone project around my accident. Through thousands of words, 12 chapters, choreography I couldn't dance myself, and a poem, here is the culmination of my Minor in Writing. This semester long journey has allowed me to see that coping and escaping can and are synonymous for me; I have effectively dealt with my greatest difficulty by breaking free from the confinement of my own body and mind. Though this writing has been a huge component in my process of healing, I'm not sure that I can say this quest will ever have an end point, and I'm not sure that it needs to. But if I can inspire or influence just one other person to find peace after trauma along the way, I will have succeeded. So with this story, here is my escape. 

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