When It Is and When It Is Not

I’m at the checkout of a local shop, sorting through my wallet, when the cashier says it.

You have a muscle problem.”

This isn’t a question, but a firm statement. I look up, confused, thinking immediately that she sees something in my face. Am I having a neurological issue? Is there something wrong? What don’t I know? I take inventory and find that nothing is out of the ordinary.

No,” I say. “Why?”

She nods toward my right arm, and I quickly understand. My heavy quilted tote bag is hanging over the top of my wrist instead of in my hand or over my shoulder, the way another person would probably carry it. My arm is stiff, straight out and away from my body, and I note that it looks comically like the arm of a coat rack. My wrist bows under the weight, and my hand is balled up, soft, like a baby’s doughy fist in the first stages of learning how to make the shape.

I’m caught off guard, not so much by the way my arm looks—it’s been this way my whole life—but because I had not known until the cashier pointed it out how I had been holding it. I tend to tuck my arm into my side, obscuring my hand under long sleeves or pushing it somewhat behind my back. Now it is out and drawing definite attention. I’m surprised too at the sudden embarrassment I feel, something tinged with shame, as if having to see my arm is a nuisance, an interruption for the young woman.

You have a muscle problem,” she says again.

I say no, and give her a shortened version of what I tell everyone.

When I was being born, I got stuck and the doctor had to pull me out with forceps. He pulled too hard and damaged my arm.”

This is usually enough to satisfy people. They typically nod or make some vaguely supportive comment before moving on. This young woman, however, pulls back.

Oh, okay! Okay.” She’s holding her hands in a low defensive position like she’s sorry she asked, shaking her head, offended, maybe embarrassed, I can’t tell. “That’s fine,” she says.

I can be an oversharer at times, but I don’t think this is too much, especially considering the blunt way she blurted out her observation, already seeming to be sure she was correct, not concerned at all that perhaps I was sensitive to the question, not even bothering to ask Do you have a muscle problem? Instead, she seemed eager, as if she knew a person with “muscle problems” and was reaching for an awkward attempt at camaraderie. There is something subtly off-putting about this possibility, the way someone might hear an accent and obtusely ask, “Where are you from?” without having any meaningful follow-up.

The young woman is staring now, waiting for me to leave, and because she still seems somewhat horrified by the fact that I did not just agree with her assessment of me, I take an odd little pleasure in adding the bag she hands me to my coatrack arm before nodding goodbye.

It’s not until I’m outside that I consider that I still said no. No, I did not have a muscle problem, when in fact, that’s exactly what I have. When I was a kid, my mother trained me to explain my arm. “I have Erb’s palsy,” I told adults, sometimes pronouncing it Irv’s, then, when I was a little older, being sure it was Herb’s. I realize I have not thought of the term in years, and I have, I suppose, forgotten that the idiosyncrasies of my arm have a name, that they’re not just a part of me, but a legitimate medical condition. What this means for me is that I can’t straighten my arm at the wrist or elbow. My hand can turn over only halfway. I have half the grip strength in my right hand as I do in my left, and though I am able to use both hands for most things, I tend to do things one-handed. I’m used to these things, and generally, I do not spend time thinking about my right arm. Most of the people I know, I have known for years; new people do not bring it up.

The truth is, I am not particularly sensitive about my arm. This is what intrigues me about the interaction with the cashier. Why did I deny having nerve damage? Maybe it was in the term muscle problem. It strikes me as an odd way of putting it. I don’t think of myself as having a muscle problem any more than I would think of myself as having a height problem if something were too high for me to reach. Some things I can do quite easily, others I cannot do at all. These are the facts of my body. Cut and dry. No offense. None taken.

And yet, I am not immune to the fact that I look different, that my arm is irregular. I sometimes have a visceral reaction to seeing myself in a full-length mirror or in the reflection of a storefront. I know it is me. I know my arm looks like this, but there is a disconnect. This is not how I envision myself. In the reflection, my arm looks to me like a separate body part, something turned sideways and crunched into an odd position. My hand clings close to my side, the fingers bending behind me, slightly up toward my forearm like someone subtly sneaking a reverse low-five behind their back. But during the day, when my arm is in motion, I must manipulate it to do the tasks I need it to do, and in front of me, my hands look much the same.

I have been told by many people that they never noticed my hand at all, or rather that it is not very noticeable, or that they thought I was only temporarily holding my hand in an odd position. I have been asked by strangers if I have burned myself, maybe because it looks as if I am babying it, holding it up the way a dog might hold its wounded paw. But it is seldom that someone comes out and says the thing, calling direct attention to it. The cashier, I sense, saw the full-length mirror version of me. The one I wish to avoid. Perhaps that is what threw me.

I see versions of this inconsistent self-perception everywhere; my mother looking at older pictures, wondering aloud how she could have ever thought she was “fat back then.” Another woman, as is so often the case with women, commenting on her weight. “I hold it well though, don’t I?” she asks, hoping the response matches what she sees in the mirror. I see it all the time in my trans and gender nonconforming friends. A loved one reiterates to us that she has seen herself as a female since she was a child, then shakes her head, saying, “I cannot use a public bathroom. I wouldn’t want to see me in there.”