For as long as I have felt deep, unwavering empathy, I have also felt scalding yet mind-numbing anger. My childhood was spent going to routine hospital visits. Weight and height checks that never satisfied my need to be taller. To take up more space when I felt so damn small. X-rays where I had to be so still it was like I didn’t exist. A statue meant to be looked and prodded at, but never asked how I felt.

Sitting in a bland room waiting for an old man to point at my x-rays and explain to my mother just how much surgery I was going to need. I used to spend that time cartwheeling down the hallway because a small child shouldn’t understand the absolute terror that I felt being bent, poked, examined. Why me? Every other kid in school had a normal life. Their biggest worry was falling off the monkey bars or what their mom packed for lunch. My biggest worry was when the old men were going to carve into my flesh.

A children’s hospital childhood is cold. It is unfeeling and unkind.

And yet, I was one of the lucky ones.

I could walk on my own two feet into the waiting room. I can vividly remember being a little girl sitting impatiently in the chairs, while other little girls were sitting in their wheelchairs. Or, their ankles braced with sticker covered white plastic. I knew that I got dressed on my own in the morning. I could feed myself. I knew that the same wasn’t true for the other kids in the room.

When I had my first surgery, it wouldn’t be the last. I was part of an experiment that we would later find out broke every kid’s bone at one point or another. Something intended to fix me would break me. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is. Five surgeries, five times that built up scar tissue and ripped apart my mind. Another routine, but this time fueled by anesthesia. Being a twelve-year-old girl is hard enough, but not being able to get myself out of bed made everything that much harder. Couldn’t shower on my own. Couldn’t do much of anything by myself. And still, no one listened.

Not long after my first surgery, the physical therapist came to my room and told me it was time to try to walk. Wrapped from right hip to ankle in a fiberglass cast, I sat up in my bed. The room began to spin. Nausea rolled through my body the moment I stood. I looked this man in the eye and told him I couldn’t, that I was going to pass out, and he asked me to take a step. Just one. You’re going to be fine. A step and a half later, my fragile body hit the floor. I don’t know how much later, I woke up to screaming alarms and panicked nurses who almost hit the code button. I looked this man in the eye and said, “I told you so.”

Helplessness made me resent myself. Made me angry at the world. I was twelve, and I couldn’t figure out what I had done to deserve this fate. I still don’t have an answer. I can’t stand the smell of a hospital or the look of a doctor to this day. My five surgeries made me familiar with my rage, but the waiting rooms filled with other children gave me an empathy I’ve never let go of. I hope I never do. It’s a superpower, but it’s also my downfall. Understanding the root of someone’s actions, even when they hurt you, doesn’t excuse that they hurt you. I’m still learning that.

I am angry and empathetic, and I don’t know how to balance the two. Where do they intersect within me? I discovered them around the same time, they’re completely intertwined in my body. When I met grief as a teenager after losing my sister, which quickly attached to my anger, the mess only grew more complicated. I’m reminded of when I was in therapy in college and I described my emotions, my mess, as a tangle of Christmas lights. All the strands are wrapped around one another. Anger around empathy around grief around joy around sadness around loneliness around excitement. I’ve tried to untangle them, but they’re determined to remain how they are. I can pick at the strands the way I pick at myself, but I never find what I need. My grief feels like my anger, and my sadness feels like my grief. There are hints of joy, of happiness, of the good wrapped around all the others.

Knowing that I can’t untangle it all, I find that I still shut down completely. It’s a trauma response, a coping mechanism, that I’ve relied on for a long time. Hiding within myself. Despite more than a decade of space between us, I feel like that little girl who was afraid and helpless all over again. I wish I didn’t. I know I still carry her with me, but I wish I could forget. I hate that I feel that way. She survived so that I could grow. I should be grateful for her, and I am, but I so wish she didn’t have to endure any of that. What I wouldn’t give for her biggest worry to have been the monkey bars.