We Are All Compensating for Something

On (un)broken bodies, a loss for words & negotiating realities

My idea of symmetry & balance.

This story begins with an unkind pilates teacher, the type of instructor who spends most of the class walking around the room adjusting students (helpful) while also identifying their flaws and weaknesses loudly in a tiny studio (never helpful). When it was my turn to have my shortcomings and failures highlighted, she told me each side of my body was compensating for the other on both my back and my front, and added other harsh things I won’t repeat. When I whispered I had major surgery earlier this year on my left breast and surrounding area so yes, perhaps that side was weaker than the other, she shrugged and moved on to another victim, helpless on the mat beside me. “Are you sure you drink enough water?” I, and the entire class, heard her say to the other woman.

After class, when I innocently (stupidly) went up to ask if she could recommend anything to restore (muscular) balance she told me my only hope, if there was any at all, was a good osteopath, coincidentally at the clinic where she works. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “It [you! your spine!] is like a broken three-legged stool.” I wish I could say this woman’s misguided comments did not affect me profoundly that evening or that I did not cry in the gym bathroom after class and then again at home, in front of my kids, feeling like there was another “broken” thing about me. But that would be like…compensating for the truth!

As awful as this interaction was, it got me thinking about what it means to compensate for something physically, but also emotionally and linguistically. The good pilates or yoga instructors remind their students that one side of the body is different than the other so a pose that feels one way on the right, might not feel the same on the left. When we hurt an arm, a leg, a toe, an eye, the other arm, leg, toe, eye often begins working harder to make up for the (temporary) loss. The same thing occurs with our senses. When there is a trauma or pain on one side of the body, our instinct is to protect the place of pain, sometimes for a very long time, if not forever.

We are always compensating in language, whether we are monolingual or multilingual. Linguistic compensation occurs in translation, something I have written about before in the context of motherhood. When we are at a loss for words, we compensate with gestures, storytelling or paraphrasing. Compensation is in a way a part of translanguaging, or using our full linguistic repertoires and moving from language to language when we need something the other language cannot offer us in the moment, or ever. (Code-switching also comes to mind but it is slightly different than translanguaging as it looks at language from the outside, separating the languages while translanguaging is about reconsidering this separation and thinking of one repertoire made up of many languages.)

In all of these scenarios, compensation is not about what is missing or broken but rather, how to draw from the abundance we have when one source is sometimes not enough. And how lucky are we. Parts of our bodies compensate for others every day depending on how we slept, how we feel, where we hold the tension and keep our fears about life and the world. If you are like me and talk a lot when you are nervous, words and terrible jokes compensate for fear and confusion. Compensation may offer comfort. For now, my hips are wobbly in bridge pose, my symmetry has changed, my strength is not the same (yet) but I am still on the mat and perhaps that is compensation in itself. (Feel free to use this positive compensation idea beyond pilates or yoga in whatever way you need today!)

One of my favourite writers, Deborah Levy, was giving a lecture at the Southbank a few days ago. As I sat in the front row, the fan-girl I am, I listened to her tell the story of her father who, at 91 on his deathbed called her over to transcribe something as he could no longer write. She thought it would be what he wanted for his funeral or something “important” he needed to record before his death. But what her father wanted Levy to write down was a food menu for the week. At this point, Levy told the audience, her father was so sick and frail he could no longer eat solids so this idea of a menu was unfeasible, something her father was aware of. And yet, Levy went along with it: her father dictated a menu, she wrote it down, the two of them, “negotiating realities”, she said, because they both needed it in the moment. What is the difference in moments like these between negotiation of reality and compensation? Perhaps we compensate for what we need in order to negotiate realities. And if we care about other people, and I think most of us really do, we negotiate the realities of others just as much as our own.

Thank you for reading.

The last part in the series of notions around home on food (!) is coming next!