Embodied dissonance

Selfie self-portrait taken at the Kiewet Luminarium in Omaha, 7/31/25

I had a strange experience yesterday. I got a free month of Apple TV+ and decided to activate it to enjoy some vegging out between house guests. I started up with a series that I had been enjoying before my spinal cord injury (The Morning Show) – new episodes had come out since I last watched – and about 20 minutes in, my body started to respond as if something very sad had just happened. I started to feel very cold, my body tensed up and curled in on itself, my eyes teared up, and my joints started to hurt from the tension. It felt almost like a panic attack, but with deep sorrow instead of panic. Can you have a “sadness attack”?

The episode wasn’t really emotionally charged at this point, so it took a little while for me to figure out what was going on – and at first, I wasn’t even trying to figure it out, I was just focused on finding myself a blanket and some drinking water. I turned off the TV, rolled in front of my window to look at the trees and the clouds and remind myself of the bigger world.

And then I realized: ah, it’s the grief button. The one where the grief ball used to be huge in a small box and so it hit the pain button all the time, and now it’s a smaller ball in a bigger box so it surprises me when it hits just right and gets the pain going again.

The “strange” part of the experience this time wasn’t that there was grief, but rather that it wasn’t a thought or a memory that triggered it, at least not in the typical way for me. Instead, it was the experience of doing something that I had done before my injury (watching this show, investing in these characters) that got my grief ball bouncing. My brain hadn’t even noticed what was going on at first – but I should know by now that the body keeps the score even when my mind is elsewhere.

Maybe it’s because my brain is so tuned in that I don’t often get surprised this way. When I see someone for the first time since my injury, I’m open to it feeling hard or odd or whatever it feels like. I’m gentle with myself going into it, and I give myself permission and space to feel sad, or resentful, or hurt, or distant, or anything else. Or when I’m in a new situation, maybe doing something I haven’t tried since my injury, I intentionally surround myself with compassion, and I usually gift myself with time afterwards for an internal debrief and recharge. But sitting down to watch a television show, one that has nothing to do with spinal cords or wheelchairs? I guess it’s good to remember that I can still be surprised!

When I was looking for a photo to put it at the top of this Substack post, I started off (as I often do) by doing a keyword search in an image database (Unsplash). I tried the word “dissonance” because this experience reminded me of cognitive dissonance, except that it was my body and not my curious brain where this was located. That search led me to the keyword “double exposure,” which then reminded me of a selfie I had taken at our new science museum earlier this summer.

As I pulled up that picture, I found the one below too. The two photos were taken just moments apart, and together they remind and reassure me that no one thing is everything, that both the hard and the good can be present at once, and that I can keep looking for the joy even when the grief button or the un-making parts of life are going strong. Because isn’t it fantastic to see these two colorful people dancing?!!!

Me and my little buddy at the Kiewit Luminarium, 7/31/25

Also, if you have a better/different word than dissonance – or a more expressive phrase than “embodied dissonance” – I’d love to hear it.