Needles, Sparkly Laces, & Sarongs: In Search of the Iconic Woman

Needles.  There is little else that terrifies me like needles.  I am not sure how or why the phobia began in my life, only that from an early age I have been hysterically fearful of white lab coats, the quick dab of a wet sterilizing pad, tourniquets, and the idea of anything sharper than a pencil nearing me.

Before entering sixth grade I was required to complete another dreaded round of childhood immunizations.  My mom knew what an ordeal this could be, how it would take forty minutes to coerce me from the car, and another twenty to pry my white-knuckled hands from the wooden trim running along the walls of the office corridor.  With the hope of avoiding such a scene and relieving me of these anticipatory tears, she simply stopped telling me where we were going.  Or she’d make something else up.  A ‘sale at the neighboring shopping mall’ always seemed to do the trick.

Sometimes she would inch me in with little half lies. 

“Yes, we are at the doctor, Maggi, but all you have to do is pee in a cup.  You can handle that, right?”

One time, while I was still under the impression that I was there for a pee test, the doctor guided me around the corner to a large padded armchair and asked me to have a seat.  I knew there was popsicles promised at the end of this appointment, so I complied, slowly dragging my white platform Sketchers with glitter aglets across the floor.

The doctor had turned to face the counter, blocking the horrifying artillery of pads, syringes and needles laid across his tray.  I did not see it coming.  I just felt the tightening of rubber across my arm and realized, with a surge of anger, what I had been cornered into.  My eyes welled instantly with the tears of betrayal.

How could she do this to me?

I felt like a trapped animal in the chair.  A helpless victim, who had been turned in by her own mother.  Lips quivering and arms braced, I had no choice but to remain in the chair and have my blood drawn against my will. 

Years later when I was old enough to vote, attend college, travel alone through Europe, and drive myself to the doctor, you would think that I would be a different person.  Like, maybe, a grown woman who could handle a little prick?

But nothing changed.  In fact, I used my greater independence as means of manipulating situations I previously had no control of.  When I visited the doctor for a check-up, she would review my medical history chart, and always say the same thing:

“Well, Margaret, it looks as though your last blood test was over 7 years ago. ”

Or “Wow, you are overdue for 4 immunizations.”

No kidding.

“Yes, and that’s something we can easily take care of today.”

She said “we” as if she was ready to endure the same pain and anguish she was prescribing.  Ha.  She then wrote an appointment slip for the “Injection Clinic” to which I felt no need to obey, and without a shiver of remorse, I walked right out of that building, past the Injection Clinic, to my own trusted getaway wheels and never looked back.  The doctor’s orders were mere suggestions that I, as an adult, could finally disregard.  Oh sweet freedom!

These guilt-free evasions last for some time, well into my college years.  But eventually it had to happen- my conscience needed to be pricked.  This is the great danger of a liberal education:  It raises philosophical questions about human freedom that you initially believe to be only theoretical, like a logistical rubics cube.   Just one intellectual experiment that could not possibly upset anything too personal in your life.  But Santa Clara would have none of that.  Every intellectual pursuit was leading me back to myself, my own beliefs, rationalizations and inconsistencies.  

For example, I learned in Fr. Ravizza’s Philosophy 151 course to distinguish two different kinds of freedom: positive freedom and negative freedom.  Negative freedom is the kind we most commonly think of.  It is used to describe “freedom from something or someone.” Political revolutions throughout history have been declared in pursuit of freedom from the tyranny of old oppressor.  When people take a vacation they say they are free from the stressful demands of their work.

 However, there is simultaneous positive freedom being expressed there, too.  It is the “freedom for.”  This freedom is about realizing our fullest potential as human beings.  Freedom of expression, freedom to love, freedom to forgive, freedom to dance through life.  Rarely are these two movements of freedom ever completely separate.  They comingle at ever chance they get.  In my own personal life, I started to examine where I was free and where I was simply under the illusion of some false freedom.  Every time I ignored the doctor’s directions and ran for the nearest exit was I really gaining freedom or was I heading straight into the slavery of my deepest fears?

I started to feel that my humanity was shrinking the more I tip toed and sidestepped around my fears. I was free to run, but not free enough to accept the benefits of immunizations and good health care into my life. Was I growing into the strong, independent woman I so wanted to be?  Or was I still that little girl, tripping over her white, glittery Sketchers and promises of strawberry popsicles?  Fear was my master, and I, it’s helpless victim.

This growing consciousness took a while to reach the surface of my life, where all the action takes place.  I was still avoiding the doctor like the plague, but now starting to feel guilty about it, like I was failing myself.  I knew that one day I was going to have to rise up and be the brave woman I had envisioned in my dreams, over and over.  Finally, the challenge came.  I was issued a blood test.  You know one of those routine check-ups that no one expects to engender an existential crisis?  No one was with me - not my mom, not my best friend, no expert hand holders.  Just me and my free will.

I walked stoically into the laboratory, one foot in front of the other, resolved not to think too much about it.  Grabbing a call number, I took a seat and waited with self-assuring calm among all the other patients.  There was a woman to my left, at least seven months pregnant, thumbing through a magazine will real calm.  She’s gotta be a regular, I thought to myself.  An elderly man sat across from me, with veiny, sun-loved and life-worn hands resting atop his cane.  The nurse entered the waiting room, clipboard in hand, and paused for a moment before pronouncing my name, “Margaret Van Dorn.” I prayed quietly for the grace to stand up.

As the nurse scanned the room, a mother and daughter stepped out from the same doorway and made their way to the exit.  The little girl skipped along, tiny fingers laced between her mother’s.  The woman wore a colorful Indian sarong that wrapped gracefully around her as she swayed out of the room and in her other hand she held her daughter’s “Dora the Explorer” backpack.  The backpack hung suspended by the arm with the cotton-ball band-aid, the one that had just been pierced.  She wasn’t nursing it like a wounded victim.  She was simply back to being a mom, though she appeared to me like a warrior goddess. 

I saw in her a woman who faced the inescapable pains of living with courage and grace, and who had somehow, somewhere along the way, learned to live past her personal fears and to care for another human being.  Her strength gave me strength and her example empowered me to rise from my chair and say to the nurse with the clipboard, “I’m right here.”

In that moment, everything shifted.  I was able to meet my fears because I no longer envisioned myself as a helpless victim, cornered and feral.  I could be exactly who I wanted to be and I could say Yes, in utter freedom, to better health care and ultimately, a livelier relationship with my own body.

I find it very interesting that while years of philosophical thought tilled in me the desire to overcome my fear, one living, swaying icon of womanhood became my sole catalyst to action.  That does not make one more essential than the other.  Had I not allowed those thoughts on freedom to soak through to my personal life, I would not have gotten 10 yards within the Laboratory.  Yet, my whole spirit was invigorated and emboldened by her example.  The image of her walking gracefully across the room, grasping her daughter’s backpack without winching, became the umph or the grace within my will.   It wasn’t the idea of being a strong, self-reliant woman that made me act as such.  It was the sight of another woman, showing me exactly what that kind of strength looks like that enabled me to draw from my own internal well of power. 

If images reign supreme in our minds, how intentional must we be in deciding what kinds of images we create, include and promote in our lives?  There are little boys and girls in all of us, still held hostage by certain fears or prejudices we have yet to outgrow. The young girl in Sketchers has been aching to meet the graceful woman in her sarong.  After my fortuitous encounter, I am no longer completely possessed by my girlhood fear of needles and have become, in a sense, unbound by sparkling shoelaces. 

But it does make a girl wonder:  What other false or misleading images must we seek liberation from?  What keeps us from realizing our own internal strength and of “having life to the full?” (John 10:10).

This began as a personal reflection about conquering an irrational fear of needles.  But if we continue to part the curtain some more, I suspect we shall come upon a whole tray of questions ready to puncture the norm.  And so I wonder out loud:

 What images do you dream will be embodied? 

Who are your role models and what about them catapults your desires into action? 

What old and childish images, like that of the victim, need to be challenged in both your personal life and our broader social consciousness?