1.
You want to write but you cannot write. Your body objects. Your shoulder throbs, the pain radiating down your arm to lodge in your elbow, across your shoulder to fizzle up your neck, itchy heat into your jaw, your gums, your ear. Your body is telling you to stop moving your fingers across the keyboard. But this feels too cruel. For the first time in your life you have no children to care for, you have no lessons to plan, you have no student emails to respond to. Your mind is alive with the thoughts you have kept silent, and now you want to write out loud. So you make a deal with your body. You will take care of the pain, swaddle it and resist the anger that swells when it overwhelms the logic of your reality. You will keep the daily routine of physiotherapy in the hope that in a year, perhaps, the pain will ease. You will do this, if you can write one thought at a time.
This is the first thought.
Sally Gander 