The first skill snapped into place, powerful and controlled, my body moving through it with precision. My hands hit the ground, my legs whipped over, momentum building exactly how it was supposed to.
But when my hands planted again, something shifted.
The angle was wrong.
My wrist bent in a way it shouldn’t have.
And then, through all the noise of the stadium and the pounding of my heart, I heard a loud and distinctivecrack.
Pain shot up my arm so fast it stole the air from my lungs, white-hot and blinding, but I was already in motion, already committed. There was no stopping it now, no pulling out without making it worse.
So I finished.
I pushed through the final movement, forcing my body upright, forcing my arms up into the ending pose, my smile locking into place like it had been programmed there.
The crowd erupted.
The music hit its final note.
And I held it.
I held the pose. I held the smile. I held everything together by sheer force of will, even as my arm throbbed violently where I had it overhead, even as I could feel something deep and wrong pulsing through it.
We closed out the routine, transitioning into the final formation, and I stayed with it, step for step, count for count, because I didn’t know how not to.
But the second the last beat faded and the routine was finished, the weight became too much to bear.
I dropped.
My knees hit the turf, my good hand immediately clutching the opposite wrist, cradling it close as the pain surged, overwhelming now that I wasn’t fighting through choreography.My vision blurred at the edges, my breath coming in short, uneven pulls as I tried to process it, to make sense of what I already knew.
This wasn’t minor.
This wasn’t something I could shake off.
This was serious.
Season-ending serious.
Voices started to rise around me, movement rushing in from the sidelines, but all I could think, all I could feel, was the weight of it settling in my chest.
And the fact that my parents had just watched the entire thing unfold.
Braden
Trauma impacts everyone differently.
I learned this at too young of an age, when I’d watched my parents go from slightly concerned over my sister being ill on vacation to full-on panicking when they realized she couldn’t move her body.
For some, everything is bright and crisp and clear, every action that needs to be taken written out in front of them like red neon lights against a black sky. That was how it was for my mom. She was on the move before any of us.
For some, there’s a calmness that washes over, like we realize we’re the anchor in a storm and that’s our only job — to keep things steady. That was my dad. He was there to anchor my mom, to hold my sister’s hand like he wasn’t worried at all, to holdmelike everything was fine.
And for some, it’s a fog — a thick, heavy, and suffocating thing that paralyzes. It’s this realization that you’re powerless and stuck, that you can’t see or feel anything clearly because the only way your body knows how to protect you is to shut down.
That was how it was for me.
I’d felt it with my sister, when Mom had climbed into the ambulance with her and Dad and I had followed behind. When we got her diagnosis. When I heard the wordsparalyzedandrare diseaseandno cure.
