Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (25 page)

The most dramatic occurrence of this in my
young
adult life (as I am refusing to fully enter adulthood, mainly because being a grownup
sucks) was the year my first book,
Swerve
, came out. It was also the year I had a film in the Sundance Film Festival,
³
which is a big deal, because I am rarely in a movie, let alone one that gets into
Sundance, which is such an honor and a validation of your work and everything, and
also they have lots of parties and you can drink for free and stuff. So, of course,
I was very excited that my film was going to be screening there, and I planned a big
trip to Utah to party and rage and snowboard and drink and walk around Park City.
Oh, and support my film. Yeah. That too.

It was a very exciting time, because right afterwards I was scheduled to go on a tour
to support my first book, and I was going to get to ride on a bunch of planes, and
take pictures, and meet celebrities, and do karaoke, and sign copies of my book, and
I felt very super extra fancy.

I invited my oldest friend to Utah to snowboard with me and get hooked up with all
the free stuff I was sure to get there, as I had heard Sundance is all about free
shit. We flew in to Park City on the same day. On the way in from the airport, I called
my husband, who wished me luck and harmlessly spoke four portentous words: “Don’t
break your arm.”

I laughed. Of course I wouldn’t break my arm! Why would I do that? Who likes breaking
their arm? I was going to rip up the snow and destroy the mountain and generally have
a killer day. I was not going to break my arm. I hated breaking limbs.

Of course, now it was in my head, so cue the Plaster of Paris.

I didn’t
set out
to break anything. I was in a great mood, the sun was out, and the house I was staying
in with friends was huge and luxurious and had a hot tub and a toaster oven.
⁴
My friend met me at the lodge, there was lots of snow on the mountain, and life was
good. I rented a snowboard short enough to make up for the fact that I hadn’t ridden
in a zillion years, but long enough not to make me look like a pussy. It was going
to be a perfect day.

As it was, I landed at eleven, was snowboarding by noon, and at four in the afternoon
my arm was broken. Very badly.

See what telling me not to do something does? Aargh!

It is worth mentioning here that my oldest friend is a guy. A guy I love dearly, but
a guy nonetheless. And as such, he is someone I feel competitive with and must beat
at everything. Not because I need to teach him a lesson or get payback for some earlier
perceived slight, but because he is a boy and I am a girl and I cannot let him be
better than me at anything other than having a deep voice and peeing standing up.
⁵
I love him, and he is better than me at lots of things: computers, knowing things
about sports, memorizing old-school hip-hop lyrics, making the shape of a vagina with
his thumbs and forefingers, and being dourly sarcastic. He is definitely a way better
snowboarder than I am. But I will never,
ever
tell him that.

Ever
.

On this day, I had not ridden in a very long time, and it was very important to me
to be as good as the last time we rode together, and maybe better, because I was older,
and people are supposed to improve at stuff as they get older, right? But my friend
rode faster than me from the very beginning, because he
had
gotten better as he had gotten older, while I had gotten soft and puddinglike, which
made me mad, so I sped up to keep pace. The faster I rode, the more afraid I was that
I might fall and mess up my face,
⁶
which made me even angrier at myself for being so girly, which made me ride even
faster. Soon I was riding a bit out of control, which scared me, but also made me
happy, because I like feeling a little scared, and also because it made me look like
a badass, and freaked out all the rich white people who were already a bit confused
at seeing a giant black girl go screaming by on a snowboard.

I was rocking people’s world—or so I thought, as I went whizzing down the mountain
about to pee myself in terror. I was ripping it up.

At the bottom of a particularly long and harrowing run, we came to a stop at a line
for another lift that would take us to another part of the mountain. My friend had
stopped before me, because he was always getting to the bottom before me, because
he was faster than me and wanted to rub my nose in it like a naughty dog.
⁷
And I came to a screeching halt right next to him, to show him I meant business and
that the only reason I was riding more slowly was because my board was a rental so
I couldn’t really turn on the afterburners. As I did, I realized that my braking abilities
had decayed significantly in the more than four years since I had ridden last, and
I wasn’t going to stop fast enough, and I was going to crash into him.

But crash hardcore. Because I’m fucking hardcore.

I actually didn’t crash into him. I stopped like two inches in front of him, and then
I crashed
across
him. I fell over his board, and I realized if I put my hands down to break my fall,
they would hit the metallic blade-like edges of his snowboard, and I would sever all
my fingers at the palm, and make a really big bloody mess for the mountain patrol
to clean up, and ruin my mittens.

So instead, I put my hands out, on the other side of his board, so that I would not
cut off my fingers, and so that I could fall in the most painful and awkward way possible,
which is what I did.

I felt fine when I stood up, after I swallowed a big bolus of embarrassment about
falling in the lift line, and then swallowed a big rash of shit from him about falling
at all. But my arm felt funny. Crunchy. Clacky. Maraca-like. I complained. He told
me to stop being such a pussy, and I told him to go fuck himself, because this is
how we talk to each other.
⁸
And I got back on the lift and rode back up to the top and took another four screeching
runs down the mountain.

During which I fell on the same arm three more times.

Because when I fuck something up, I fuck it up but good. I fucking
mean
it.

At this point, my arm was starting to act funny, like pointing in the wrong direction
funny, and going all numb and wonky and feeling like the arm of a dead person. This
is when I called it. Yes, it took me until my arm felt cadaverous to decide it was
time to stop snowboarding. I am bullheaded and obstinate, but I am also willful and
slow to admit defeat. So I have all that going for me.

When I went to the mountain doctor, he told me what I had suspected after the second
fall: I had broken my arm spectacularly. Lots of little pieces were rolling around
in there, alongside a few bigger chunks—the x-ray of my elbow looked like a bag of
calciferous marbles. I was pissed, a bit at my friend for making me so competitive,
and a bit at my husband for telling me not to do what he knew I would be powerless
not to do once I heard it. And, of course, I was mad at myself, for being such a blazing
idiot.

But only a little, because of course this was all other people’s fault.

I spent the rest of Sundance that year with my arm in a sling. They couldn’t cast
my arm, because if you cast an elbow, apparently it fuses in place and never bends
again, and you’re forced to lean casually against walls and bars everywhere so that
your bent arm looks like a jaunty pose and not the terrible result of your reckless
life choices. I refused drugs because I hate drugs and also because drugs make you
say stupid things and I need absolutely no help doing that, thank you very much. And
while my plan was to control my pain via alcoholic beverages, this was the most poorly
conceived strategy ever, because I could never drink fast enough to get ahead of the
pain, and so was both boozy
and
pissy the entire trip, partly because I was drunk, partly because my arm killed,
and mostly because I had broken my right elbow and so couldn’t zip up my pants and
was always holding in all the pee I had made trying to drink the pain in my elbow
away. And I was a huge party pooper for all my friends who just wanted to drink all
night and sploosh around in the hot tub and eat toasted bread in the morning slathered
in butter, while all I wanted to do was moan gutturally while wandering around the
house like a phantom, muttering about snowboarding and brittle bones and being hardcore.

I was a fistful of hot, wet, ouchy mess.

After Sundance, I had to spend two weeks on a book tour, during which I had to sign
books with my left hand because I had broken my writing hand. Hundreds of people have
the signature of one “Asa Tyr” in their books, as that was the best I could manage.
Occasionally people just got a giant “A,” or an X, or a few well-placed salty tears
after they grabbed my broken arm without knowing it was broken (it not having a cast
’cause of the fusing and all) and squeezed it like I owed them money.

Was my life ruined? Not even close. I still snowboard, and I still love my friend,
and my elbow healed like new,
⁹
and life went on. It was only hugely inconvenient that I did the exact thing I was
told not to do, and thank god it was only my elbow.

But it did teach me that I needed to find a way not to be so defiant of others, or
of safety, or the universe in general, and that maybe it was time to slow down a bit,
and not try to prove how badass I was to absolutely everyone all the time.

Of course, I only learned that for a little while. I went right back to the old Aisha
as soon as my elbow healed. Because apparently, I will not do even what I tell
myself
to do.

I never listen.

( 30 )

The Time I Broke My Foot, Alone, in a Hotel Room

“You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.”
—
M
ICHAEL
C
ONNELLY

“You can’t fix a broken toe with Scotch tape.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Just
to prove that I do not need others, or a high-speed athletic activity, or obstacles,
or any reason at all to self-injure, I offer this anecdote.

I was in Miami for a photo shoot,
¹
one for which I was very anxious, because it was going to be me and a bunch of models,
and they would all be models, and of course, I would be
me
. The thing most people do not realize about models is that when they are all together,
they look normal. Thin, yes, but not as abnormally thin as they
actually
are, because contextually they are thrown next to other crazy-thin people and other
things that resemble them, like light posts, palm tree trunks, and drinking straws.
So compared to those things, they just look slender and fit, like they decided to
hit the treadmill or cut out gluten or something.

But! Put them next to someone who is of a normal weight, and eats dairy, and loves
gluten like she birthed it from her womb, and something very different happens. The
models all look thin, and the normal-sized person looks as if she has some kind of
glandular illness that has made her puff up like a manatee. I’m not saying this is
what I was worried about in regards to this particular shoot, I’m just saying this
is what was shaking me awake in a cold sweat every night for weeks on end in the months
leading up to the photo shoot. Those fucking models and their fucking oppressive skinniness.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my body. I have a very generous sense of self-worth, and
I believe in being healthy. I like to promote responsible and realistic standards
of beauty, not terrible and totally unattainable standards that most people cannot
meet, male or female, even if they never ingested solid food again, and had their
bottom two ribs removed by a wild-eyed surgeon wielding a bone saw and a tapeworm.
These model people are
tiny.
They could be used as an example of developing-world malnourishment, if people in
the developing world could afford to live on yogurt, cocaine, and organic fair-trade
pesticide-free roll-your-own cigarettes.

You might think I’m being catty, but I am talking about the dudes. I actually had
one of the guys on this shoot—who had slender little legs and a waist so small that
two pairs of his pants could have been sewn together to make a single pair of very
depressing chinos for me—tell me my build was “athletic.” Which I took as a very nice,
very modern way of saying, “Wow, you disgust me.” I suppose I should have appreciated
the effort.

I had tried to diet in the most responsible way in the weeks between when I was asked
to participate in this shoot and when it happened. I did not starve myself. I made
sure my meals were balanced. I worked out, but not to the point of self-destruction.
I was reasonable.

And I was fucking
starving
. I don’t know how people diet. As it is, all I think about is food, all the time—when
I am working, when I am driving, when I am on the toilet.
²
And when I am trying to diet, my food obsessing goes from a low background hum to
a deafening foreground rumble. I watch the Food Network while I am on the treadmill.
I look at pictures of layer cakes made out of meatloaf on the Internet in bed before
falling asleep. I make a comprehensive and thorough mental accounting of every single
time I have eaten ice cream, and try my hardest not to touch myself. When I am dieting,
I am completely unhinged.

So I struggled through this period of dietary restriction and borderline madness because
these photos would be committed to the annals of history forever, and I did not want
to be the homely bystander who had wandered accidentally into a faerie wonderland
of beautiful sylphs, then plopped to her haunches to watch the goings-on, wobbly jowls
agape. I wanted to at least kind of look like I belonged. And I was miserable. I hated
everyone and everything.