Talking about circus injuries

Why you should talk about injuries (when you want to) AND why you shouldn’t have to (when you don’t)

In one of my favourite books of all time How to Be a Woman, feminist writer and raconteuse Caitlin Moran skilfully places two chapters side by side: ‘why you should have children’ (on the mixed joys of parenthood) and ‘why you should not have children’ (on the ways we can positively contribute to the world if we don’t).

As someone who made the descision not to have children at age 11, this was a great relief to me. The first of these chapters had me feeling a little called out. So to follow it up with the counter argument (and from the perspective of having had two children herself) was wonderful foil. It remains one of my favourite juxtapositions I’ve ever encountered in a book.

Back in January 2023 I’d had two injuries in quick succession, despite feeling the strongest, healthiest and most rested leading up to that time. I wrote about it on Instagram, on here, openly talked about it with my students, found modifications for my practice that still allowed me to be physical, and generally tried to turn a Bad Thing into something… with a silver lining. I guess the message I was advocating at the time, translated into a Moran-style chapter heading, was ‘why you should talk about injuries’. (TL;DR: (i) normalise talking about injuries because (ii) injuries can happen to everyone, but become pretty inevitable for athletes like aerialists especially when working at a certain intensity or skill level; (iii) it’s not a failing/failure and it’s not your fault; (iv) injury prevention is a misnomer because we can’t ‘prevent’ them because (v) they happen and we can only only ever try to prepare the body well, work to address our imbalances or areas of weakness, then manage the outcomes when they do occur.]

Little did I know that this was just the tip of the chuffing iceberg. 2023 was NOT a great year for me health-wise folks. In fact it was THE worst year EVER. [I should say at this point that even having one mild cold a year is unusual for me - so this was off the scale. I can’t drink alcohol, have a healthy, mostly plant-based diet, take rest days from training every week and get lots of sleep.]

I kinda suspected it was going to be when, on 2 January, I woke up with aforementioned wrist injury that seemed unconnected to anything I’d done. I joked with my colleagues at Syrcas Byd Bach that ‘this better not be some sort of advent calendar of injury: what’s behind the door this week?!’ and, promptly manifested exactly that. By mid Feb I’d injured my wrist, neck, had suspected shingles, cellulitis, laryngitis, been on two courses of strong antibiotics, the second of which coincided with some sort of systemic sciatic nerve meltdown resulting in intense pain in my SI joint, low back, hip and pelvic floor. This took 5 weeks to calm down with extensive physio and osteopathy, just in time for me to teach at Nofitstate Circus Village in mid-March. After 5 days there, I had a weird pancreatic inflammation resulting in intense abdominal pain which meant I had to come home early. FFS!

After a couple of months of plain sailing, by June a mysterious shoulder pain emerged without apparent cause during a 5 day workshop (the beautiful Grounded workshop with Alex Allan, Magalie Lanriot and Rosy Roberts exploring dance improvisation and aerial rope). Mercifully this cleared up in a week in time for me to keep rehearsing an act for my friend’s wedding but only for Rich to come home from a shoot (he’s a sound recordist for documentary TV) with Covid which wiped us both out. Covid hit me HARD. Needless to say, I did not perform at the wedding.

I somehow made it through the rest of the summer, hosting and training with some visiting aerialists from across the world which was nourishing and amazing. But the day after a photoshoot in September, I had a return of pelvic/sciatic meltdown. Fortunately, after the general mystery from the spring and some sleuthing into pelvic/sacroiliac biomechanics by one of my coaches, I had a much better idea of possible causes and helpful treatments. So I was back in action to perform at the end of October. But in mid November, together with a weird seasonal malaise, anxiety about yet more dark world events and an intense need to hibernate, came a shoulder injury. Again unconnected to a single incident (90% of injuries manifest for me thus: ‘warm up, train, cool down, roll, eat, dog walk, rest, roll again, go to bed 100% fine = wake up injured’. I sometimes wonder what I do in my sleep. I used to sleepwalk a LOT in my childhood and 20s and had zero memory of what I did, so maybe I train back flags and straps (badly)…) and hard to diagnose since the pain kept moving around and being very inconsistent.

This was THE final straw. And this time - I just didn’t want to talk about it. I guess an element of this was the shame that it had happened yet AGAIN, and that this would reflect on my training, training load, my commitment to prehab and mobility, my age, my general health, my nervous system regulation - all things that I take pride in conscientiously addressing. And as my previous post on injuries argued, this kind of self-blame shame is not a good reason for keeping quiet about injuries.

But I think this time my not-talking about it was also a form a self-care, a needing to retreat from any kind of obligation to tell the world about it, so that I could use my energy elsewhere: spending time with my body, running some diagnostics, understanding what or how serious the injury was, grieving for the training I was missing, finding patience for the frustration, conserving my energy for the conversations with my physio and osteopath, focusing on the PT drills for rehabilitation, and taking time to get my head around possible adaptations to my practice.

(There’s something about the rabbit-in-the-headlights panic of injury that means I forget all the other ways of moving that are still available to me when I’m not able to do my regular aerial workouts. Plus this time, some bloody-minded and exhausted part of me just didn’t even want to train or move AT ALL for a while.) And sometimes, I even find it hard to deal with others’ empathy. Unreasonable or ungrateful though this may sound, it feels like a mirror that reminds me (or even magnifies) this really is a bad thing i’m going through, and I don’t want to be reminded of that. (Maybe I’m a little oversensitive to this. When i got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in my late 20s, my mother - horrorstruck by it all - phoned me every day to ask how my pain was, when I was trying to accept rather than assess it and find strategies to focus on the things I could do).

So, this is my metaphorical second chapter (in the How to Be an Aerialist book I have not written). My ‘why you shouldn’t have to talk about injuries (if you don’t want to)’ chapter. I’m sorry if my previous blog on this subject was annoying or haranguing. There are so many more ways you might need to expend your energy and it’s OK to draw in to heal if that’s what you need. But just know that if we keep speaking about injuries when we feel able to, we will continue to create a culture where it’s OK to do so. And the support will be there for you if and when you need it.