Bent, not broken.

I was thirteen when they told me my spine had a curve in it. Two curves, actually — an S that ran from my shoulders to my hips, like the body had taken a wrong turn somewhere and then tried to correct itself. The brace came shortly after. So did the nickname kids made up at school. Scoli. They would knock on the plastic and run.

I am, on balance, grateful for the brace. I am grateful for the surgery a few years later. I am grateful for the titanium that now runs the length of my spine and lets me carry a camera backpack through seven countries in Central America without asking too much of me. None of that is the thing I want to say about it.

The thing I want to say is that I made photographs because I didn’t have words. I photographed myself before the surgery, the morning of it, in the hospital, in the months after, and now, years on. I made the essay because at thirteen I would have wanted to see a thirteen-year-old who looked like me and was going to be okay. I wasn’t okay yet, when I started. I needed to see the picture of being okay before I could find my way into it.

Bent, not broken is what came out the other side. KIRO-TV picked it up. So did Federal Way Mirror and The Mighty. I connected with a group called Curvy Girls Scoliosis and spoke at one of their meetings. The girls asked the kinds of questions you can’t ask grown-ups, and I tried to answer them honestly.

If you found this page because you are about to have surgery, or because you are inside a brace and you hate the brace and you hate the world and you hate the people who knock on the plastic and run — I am writing this from the other side of all of it. It does not stay this way. The body keeps going. The body is also a story. You can choose how to tell it.