“Oh you silly silly boy, didn’t anybody tell you?”
He said. Or at least that’s what I heard…
You see - I’m a 17 year old football meathead at this point, being laughed at by a guy who cracked the Seattle Storm’s backs. But what he said changed my life, so maybe it will change yours too.
For about 2 years, I had been struggling mightily against a most worthy adversary - an ankle that just wouldn’t stop spraining.
And no matter what I did, it just kept getting worse. So to help, we started with a small cloth ankle brace just during practices to help me out, but then it sprained again.
So we got a bigger ankle brace to give it more stability during practices and games, until my ankle found a way to sprain itself through that.
Then, with price as no object, we went for the cadillac of ankle braces. A big honkin thing that could pass as a midieval torture device with a non-plussed glance.
I started wearing that thing around all the time, because my ankle was so fragile. Eventually the brace started to stink so ferociously from overuse that my 3yo brother refused to go near the ‘smelly-cheese thing.’
But good news, my ankle was safe.
Until it wasn’t.
The next week, I sprained it so bad that my ankle turned into a plum the size of a grapefruit.
So my dad called in a few favors and somehow got me on this chiropractor’s table.
When I hobbled onto his table, he looked me up and down, asked me what I’d been doing to help my ankle, and he laughed knowingly.
He looked at me, and said
“Oh you silly silly boy, didn’t anybody tell you? When you use an ankle brace to provide stability for your ankle, the ankle learns that it doesn’t need to provide its own stability. So the muscles that are supposed to do that actually start to atrophy…”
“Um…” I said.
“Yeah, like - the more you use an ankle brace, the weaker your ankle gets. And the more you actually need more ankle brace.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said, trying to keep up… “The more I use these fricking things, the worse my body gets, and the more I will need them in the future?”
“Exactly.” He said, looking me in the eye while bending my ankle around with his hands.
“So how the fuck do I fix it?” I inquired politely.
“Well - this is gonna sound crazy, but you actually need to STOP wearing the braces. You need to re-strengthen the ankle by allowing it to struggle a bit. You might sprain it a time or two again, but over time it will become way stronger and sprain far less. “
From that day on, I threw the stinky-cheese brace into the garage, and never used it again. And the health of my ankle improved dramatically, just like he said.
I owe much more than my ankles to that beautiful doctorman though. Because he taught me something even bigger.
I call it the Ankle Brace Phenomenon. And it’s everywhere.
Here are a few examples.
The more I add Testosterone Replacement Therapy to my body, my body learns to create even less testosterone to reach its equilibrium point. This makes me even weaker and more dependent on external testosterone to survive.
If I wear glasses, I weaken the eyes underneath them over time. Necessitating even bigger glasses in the future.
When I seek comfort, I start to need more comfort. And when I keep seeking it, I need more and more and more comfort to feel ok. No amount of comfort is enough.
The more I use air conditioning, the less I can tolerate the world sans air conditioning, making me more and more a slave to AC.
When I seek more and more money, more and more money becomes the only way for me to feel ok. And anything less starts to feel very dangerous, just like my wobbly ankle.
If you start looking around for this, it is EVERYWHERE.
And if you’re like me, you’d like to be a slave to as few things as possible.
So how the fuck do we solve it?
Well, step one is to figure out our Ankle Braces.
TO FIND YOUR ANKLE WOBBLES
What are the feelings I don’t want to feel?
What situations do I avoid, and what feelings would those situations typically cause?
TO FIND YOUR ANKLE BRACES
What are the ways I avoid feeling these wobbly feelings?
What do I need to do in order to avoid these feelings?
TO FIND THE DANGER OF YOUR ANKLE BRACES
What do I become dependent on from these Ankle Braces?
What downsides are there to keeping these Ankle Braces on?
LAST STEP
What emotions would I have to feel if I took these ankle braces off and started strengthening my ankle again?
Am I willing to do this?
We’ll talk more about this phenomenon later.