Hear Me Roar

In her new book, How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship, Eva Hagberg Fisher chronicles how, after five surgeries and a lifelong battle with her health, she unexpectedly found strength and healing through yoga, friendship, and physical and emotional support.

- Eva Hagberg Fisher

“You’re better now, right?” people sometimes asked.

I had to hedge.

“Mostly,” I said. “I’m mostly OK.”

I wanted to be totally better, to have a clean break between sick and better. But illness like mine doesn’t work like that. It’s like having a cold that lingers, and you think every day might be the last day and tomorrow will be better, and then you forget what feeling better feels like and you just hang on, and “normal” changes, and you’re not sure if you still have a cold or not, until one day you wake up and you just don’t have a cold but you don’t know what broke it or why then. And I was in the in-between, even after I got better, for over a year.

I slowly edged off of almost all of my medications. I took 14 pills a day and then I took 13. Then 12, then 11, then 12, but one was different. And I kept doing everything else, everything I could think of: desensitization, allergy testing, enzymes, iron supplements, yoga, yoga, yoga. And therapy.

I signed up for a teacher training, and I set a rule: No one could touch me. It was enforceable because of the container of our weekends together, because there were only nine trainees total, because everyone was working through their shit. I was able to ease up during those hours, and because of that easing I was able to recognize how guarded I felt the rest of the time. And then slowly I began to touch again. First just my teacher-training partner, Kristen, who was so similar to me that I felt I could trust her. And then another woman, Alice, whose brightness and raspy voice felt like a waterfall of care. I touched them and then, once I could tell my nervous system that touch wasn’t only about pain, I let them touch me.