A Crippled Yogi
Andie Main explores her debilitating spinal disease, reaching sobriety, putting her stand-up comedy career on hiatus, and learning how to face her fears of doing yoga in public.
Doing Yoga in Public
My relationship with yoga is complicated. My spine is fused, so I need to do it, but because of the fusion, I am also the worst at it.
I know that I just threw this odd fact at you so casually: that I have spinal fusion. What does that even mean? It means that vertebrae in the lowest part of my spine, the coccyx, and the highest point in my spine, the cervical part- which is not the cervix, by the way- grew together, and now my ability to twist and turn and look up and look down has been severely limited.
If I lay on a hard surface on my back, my neck will not bend to meet the earth. My skull will stay suspended an inch above the ground. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to take a moment and bend your fingers backward, but pretend that this feeling of restriction is not in your hand but directly under your skull.
It’s unpleasant, and I feel it in every moment of my existence. As if it weren’t enough for me to have such a random type of disease, my genetics thought it would be funny to make me short, too, which is super rude. I have to climb the shelves at grocery stores to grab high-reaching items. (I think it's easier to climb a shelf than ask some random stranger for help, even if it is a really great way for me to meet a husband.)
This disease is called Ankylosing Spondylitis, and I have heard more than once that when I say that, it sounds like I am telling people I have a dinosaur. To clarify, that dinosaur is called the Ankylosaurus, and like me, he is short and stout. Unlike me, he has a big ol' spiky tail to squash his enemies. I would much rather have him on my team than Ankylosing Spondylitis, but Evolution fucked me over on that one too.
I am not the most influential person out there with it (that would be lead guitarist Mick Marrs of Motley Crue), nor am I the funniest (that would be Ed Sullivan). Still, I am probably the only 43-year-old lady in Williamsburg off the corner of Bedford and 2nd with it, if that counts for anything.
The symptoms started when I was 18. I was paying rent for the first time in a classic punk-rock apartment with a whirling cast of roommates who came with a rotation of substance abuse and emotional problems.
My rent was $200 a month. 1998 prices. I was going to school and working full-time, my bed was a mattress on the floor, and our coffee table was littered with cigarette butts and empty cans of Milwaukee's Best Ice (which we called The Beast). We carved into and vandalized this unfortunate piece of wood to the point where it was more like a suggestion of a table. We could not even be sure it was there. It was Schroendigger’s coffee table.
One day, I just needed to pick up my wallet from the floor, and I couldn’t. That motion, the hinge from my hips, just could not be accomplished. The things that were supposed to move did not. Instead of movement, I got a white-hot flash of shocking pain that emanated from my hips to the top of my spine. It hit me so hard that I collapsed. But at least now I could reach my wallet, so mission accomplished!
I started adapting to a life where I couldn’t move my hips, and that life was crappy. So I tried to go to a doctor, and they really, truly, profoundly did not give one shit. I don’t know if they thought I was seeking pain meds or if they just thought it would be too expensive to care about a young human in significant pain, but these initial experiences I had in our healthcare system led to years of being undiagnosed and untreated. I lost mobility, and my walking pace slowed as I tried to avoid spasms by not extending my hips or rotating my shoulders. My gait turned Frankensteinian. I wouldn’t get my diagnosis until ten years later.
Years passed, and I adapted to my painful baseline. I had blossomed from a casual drunk into a much louder one, because I added cocaine. My partner and I went to punk shows and distributed party favors that were reasonably priced and of high quality, so we became popular with the crowds, the bartenders, the venue owners, and the bands themselves.
We bought a few ounces at a time, then a few more, and as we were moving product a lot of it fell up my nose. Some of our clients were legendary bands whose patches you would see sewn on a crust punk’s vegan leather jacket, but I will not share those names here.
Between the cocaine and booze, I was too busy being insanely high to care about my deteriorating body. It was beginning to look like being super intoxicated every waking moment was not a viable long-term plan. The pain was escalating, and my mobility was dwindling.
Now, I could no longer move my neck. Now, I could no longer get up off the couch. Now, I was gaining a ton of weight. Now, my partner was worried I was going to kill myself. I personally was not worried. I felt like suicide would mean that I would no longer feel this all-encompassing mystery pain, so it actually seemed like a pretty chill idea.
One awful evening, I filled the bath with the hottest water I could handle, and filled the tub with Epsom salts, as I was instructed to do to reduce inflammation. As I lay in the tub, staring at the ceiling, a voice separate from myself told me, “If this is the way your life is going to be, it’s OK to die.”
That voice is still, technically, correct.
Don’t worry, I’m still alive.
I wasn't giving up, even when I was at my bleakest. I had been doing yoga at home on the Wii Fit- a Nintendo game from the early oughts that is so funny to think about now. We were so excited about using a game console for exercise, which is about as silly as using a game console for exercise.
One morning I woke up especially inflamed. My neck wouldn’t move at all and my hips wouldn’t allow me to hinge forward. I had begun resorting to squatting in front of the fridge and fully rotating my body instead of moving my neck.
That morning, I was so frustrated with my immobility that I took it out on myself by stretching way too hard. This was before I understood that my bones were fused together, and sometimes, I believed that if I just willed myself to bend, I would. This never worked, of course, but blind rage never does. Sometimes I gaslit myself into thinking that this was all in my head, and the only reason I couldn't bend was because I was a lazy asshole. That morning, instead of bending, I broke. I broke so severely.
The inflammation started as a dull throb, pounding at the same rate as my pulse, from my hips traveling up to my shoulders. My pain had a favorite route, and it was making excellent time during its commute.
After a few hours into my shift at work, the spark of misery erupted into the most unbearable pain I have ever experienced to this day. And there was no vocabulary for it. There was no information or logic. The only truth I knew was spoken to me through the language of agony.
I clocked out of work early, unable to articulate why I was leaving other than an email explaining I was in critical pain, and I rode the bumpy and lurching bus to Urgent Care.
I told them I couldn’t move, and I hurt, and my back was seizing up, while I was sobbing and panicking. They sent me to a room, showed me to a table, and told me to wait there. So I did. For two hours. Just me, on my back, staring at the ceiling. After I thought about how to get help while I was unable to move without stabbing pain shooting through me, I realized I had no other options, so I screamed. That got someone’s attention, and I met another doctor who also did not give a shit about me, but at least this time he was looser with the prescription pad, and I went home with some Percosets, and most importantly, with an appointment for a rheumatologist. I stayed home from work for three weeks, laying on the couch watching shitty reality TV. (This was before streaming, by the way, which I think makes this just a little more tragic)
I am so grateful that no matter how hard I tried, I never got addicted to opiates. They don’t get me high in a fun way; they just dull my ability to understand anything complex, which makes me angry because I feel stupid. So, I guess my being on Percoset is like being a MAGA supporter.
I think I was just too busy being drunk and coked up to mess around too hard with the opioids. Or maybe I don’t have the receptors in my brain’s chemistry that would allow one to get a solid buzz. Whatever the reason, looking back on my recklessness, it still seems strange that I never developed a habit. A metaverse Andie definitely did. But if that's true, then there’s also a metaverse Andie with the full use of her spine too.
Those three weeks I spent healing on the couch while being strung out and miserable was the catalyst that led me to finally get a diagnosis. I was determined to advocate for myself at all costs. Turns out, all it took was a blood test, an x-ray, and someone listening to me for five minutes. And then, I got on a medication that I had to inject into my subcutaneous stomach fat, and the pain was less. Not gone by any means, but less.
Finally, nine years after the first flare-up, I had an actual reason why everything hurt. A reason for hope! If there is a name for a disease, there is also a treatment. So I thought maybe it was time to do yoga in public, you know, where other people would be. In retrospect, I wish I had not because the experience I was about to have was so humiliating that it prevented me from doing more yoga in public again until 17 years later.
I carried my 250-pound 5’3 body to the studio on 28th and Ankeny and was met with two perfectly toned white women who stared at me in disbelief. I got “What is she doing here?” vibes immediately. I considered walking right back out, but instead, I went to the walk-in closet, dropped off my stuff, and laid down on my mat.
“You can’t bring your water here,” the instructor told me, looming above with her arms crossed.
My eyes had been closed, but I immediately jerked up, flailed my arm out of surprise, and promptly knocked over the bottle. Water spilled everywhere. I struggled to get to a standing position. “Oh, whoops,” I responded as my cheeks flushed while I died just a little bit more inside. This had to be the most awkward first impression possible: a swollen, blobby mess of a human who entered a temple of Portland-Smugness in a naive but earnest attempt to heal myself. I looked like shit to compared them, I felt like shit compared to them.
We started, and I realized I just could not keep up. The language was indecipherable; how the hell was I gonna know what Utkatasana is? The poses were unattainable and as soon as I could reach any abstract shape that could be considered the directed pose, they had already moved on to the next one. I stayed in Child’s Pose while panicking. My heart was pounding, and my tears were streaming. I had let myself down again. Had I ever even accomplished anything at all in these 27 years? Does getting a GED count? No? Time to go.
I went back into the closet, soggier than before, and changed into my street clothes. I tried to open the door, but there was resistance when I pushed, so I pushed harder. Then there was a light thud, and the door opened, and I was now standing above a pony-tailed brunette with Linda Hamilton-shaped biceps laying on the ground. Her friend was picking herself up next to her. All I knew was that I had opened a door, two yogis were on the floor, and everyone was glaring at me. If there was a record playing the soft, tuneless, ambient music piping into the studio, it absolutely would have scratched.
Then I looked around and saw that some of the other women had their hands planted on the ground and their feet pinned to the walls behind them, and I understood my responsibility on the day of the SE Portland Yoga Massacre.
I wondered who was actually at fault: was it me, as the person who opened the door? Was it the yogies who placed their feet on the door after not noticing that I had gone into the room that they blocked? or the teacher who instructed the student to place her feet there? What a divine and zen little riddle.
“Namaste?” I uttered and made a hasty exit.
The next time I would do yoga in public would not be for another 20 years. TWENTY. DAMN. YEARS. And although this session would end up being another disaster, I took to the practice so intensely that I haven’t been more than a day or two away from my mat ever since.
I was taking a break from comedy after I dropped my sophomore album, Rocky Mountain Bi, a few months before.
I had thrown my entire soul into preparing for it, and everything from the night of the album recording itself to the download numbers upon the release turned out to be a disaster.
The date I had chosen for the big night also ended up being the same night Taylor Swift was in town, so it was a miracle to sell 30 tickets by the time the show had started. I sold half of those tickets by going to dog parks and looking for people who seemed cool and telling my dog to go play with them, It was calculated and absolutely desperate. And then my tooth broke, which was cutting my tongue. Also, the bathrooms and the AC were broken pretty much as soon as the doors were open. And the lighting was so bizarre it made my clips look insane. Total disaster. When I got home from the show, my front door had thousands of tiny flies crawling all over it like I was in a horror movie. If this was not a sign that my comedy career was cursed, I do not know what a clearer one could be.
What I learned from the experience was that I had given all of my time and energy, once again, to an entity that did not give one single shit about me. That my spirit had faded, and my light had dimmed as a result. I became isolated; a walking ghost. I had spent nearly five years in Denver and belly-flopped.
I decided to retreat as quietly as I could and lick my wounds in New York, hoping to connect more deeply with my East Coast friends and find new ones.
I had been grinding for 12 years, and up to the 11th one, I was happy enough to work so hard, burning up all of my time outside of my day job at open mics, sometimes spending a whole evening standing around staring at my phone, near others doing the same, for five minutes on stage or sometimes for not even that. Those are the dues you paid to be a part of the scene, it’s one of the thousands of reasons comedians are also known as being undateable narcissists. I was funny, and that was all I cared about.
I had no industry recognition or following, nor could I break through to any of the clubs in Denver. They didn't want a middle-aged woman, they didn’t want someone who was challenging, they wanted to sell nachos. I even paid $50 to take an MC class at Comedy Works and walked away realizing that’s why I had never advanced to MC’ing there, they thought I wouldn’t take selling the nachos seriously.
Even though I had a reputation as a known crusher, the anxiety of socializing with people 10 and 15 years younger than me was draining me. I had no idea what anyone was talking about in the green rooms because I didn't follow sports, listen to the same music, or buy sneakers. I was an old dog who didn’t know how to run with the pups.
After covid, social media became the driving force in how much clout one had in the comedy world, and I hated posting clips. I hated the idea of talking to the front of my phone and thanking my new fans and asking them to support me on Patreon. I had no fucking desire to put hundreds of hours of work into dozens of clips. Especially because after you post it, if you don’t pay to boost it, social media will bury that little labor of love, or, even worse, some of your clips will start popping, and then you won’t be happy when other clips don’t pop, and you’ll start slaving away to generate material for the almighty algorithm, which only rewards the easiest to digest jokes told by the most attractive people to the largest possible audience. Those all became essential parts of the job and now I could no longer compete with it.
The energy that makes comedy adorable is not on your phone screen, it’s in the room itself. You can’t fake it in the room. The magic of stand-up is during the entire 45 minute set building up to a crescendo, it’s not about 90 seconds of crowd work.
I have seen dozens of comics who have 100k followings eat the most shit out of anyone on the line-up. It’s not a valid metric. Also, and most importantly, I look fucking insane on camera. As soon as the light hits my hair, it gives off a very Christopher Lloyd kind of vibe.
Anyway, this rant makes me look incredibly bitter and old, so I should probably stop. TLDR: My confidence crashed to the point where I couldn't even make eye contact. My sets suffered, my reactions were slowed, I walked around in a constant state of humiliation. I got canceled. I canceled myself.
Once I stepped back from the 20 hours a week I was dumping into comedy, I needed to do something else with that time. Since it was winter and there was no more hiking after work, unless I wanted to summit Green Mountain during an ice storm, I chose yoga.
I picked a hot yoga studio that was in the middle of the city, and asked my friend Stephanie to join me. It was a snowy day, and I was running late.
I am a scaredy cat when it comes to driving in the snow and I called the studio from the road to tell them I was running about 5 minutes late, and they said that’s fine; just get here in one piece.
When I finally checked in at the front desk, they showed me to the door and knocked lightly to get the teacher's attention. I saw the yoga teacher’s face for the first time, and she was pissed. She grimaced as I was allowed in and said to the class as I perp-walked to the only open spot, “Here we have our final student. Please be patient while she gets ready, and do not let her disrupt the energy we have built,” which is fair, I suppose.
I mean, I had no idea what was going on. I had never been to a hot yoga class before, and I was so ashamed that my carelessness allowed for disruption. I berated myself in my head, “See, here we go again, Andie, you just keep doing things half-assed and not thinking them through, and now you’ve disrespected a room full of strangers. Get your shit together!” god, if the teacher was mad at me at least no one could be angrier at me than I was in the moment. Also, Stephanie is NEVER gonna let me live this down. I can see her smirking under her plank!
I unrolled my mat in the corner, right in front of a mirror, giving me a full 360* view of my curdled milk belly. I tried to imagine the waves as if they were a part of the ocean instead of cottage cheese, and I took some breaths and got ready for 75 minutes of sheer Hell.
The teacher was German, and she expected precision. The class was structured after what I would learn later, is the Bikram method. It contained 26 poses. In the first 30 seconds of each pose, you settle into it while finding your threshold. Then, a cooling breath, followed by 90 more seconds within that pose.
Bikram style was all the rage in America for decades, until it turned out that he was sexually assaulting his students, like so many Gurus do. It turns out that Gurus hate women just as much as Comedy Bookers do. You wouldn’t be able to find a class titled as Bikram anymore, they’ve all rebranded, and I think that Bikram himself is on the lamb in Mexico and working hard on rebranding for his next cult, but for whatever morally ambiguous reason (or lack of reason) that there is out there in the fabric of these cosmos, his method of yoga, hot and slow, is the best one for me.
I was ready to begin.
We took a breath and started in Half Moon, where you lift your arms, touch your palms, and bend your spine to the right, hold, then bend to the left. Our teacher stated that we needed to touch our ankles and toes together and insisted we stand up straight as a part of the bend, but if I did that, I would not be able to bend from my side.
When I bend my side, it’s sort of a cheat; it’s a modification; since my spine does not inherently bend, I have adapted by bending everything that isn’t my spine.
For every action, there is a reaction, and if you want my spine to appear straight, well, you’re just gonna have to deal with my knees bending, and if you want my knees straight, we’re just
gonna have to accomplish that by lurching my back forward a little bit. I’m a teeter-totter of arthritis.
There was no way to tell my teacher this. It seemed like a terrible idea to talk since no one else had uttered a word. She was not picking up on my telepathy, but she sure did pick up on my bent knees, and went on to tell the entire group of sweaty adults how essential it is to keep your knees straight and touch your ankles together, or else you will never achieve enlightenment, and you’ll probably have a terrible life comprised of parking tickets and undercooked pasta unless YOU STRAIGHTEN THOSE KNEES.
It was at that moment that I knew I had made a mistake.
Next, we had to touch our toes, and, spoiler alert, I can’t! If I bend my knees, I can, but the posture is not pretty. I call it Frog Pose because my kneecaps jut out to either side like I’m on a lilypad waiting for a tasty fly.
My German teacher remarked, again, that our knees must be straight! And now we must lift our legs! Lift them as high as you can! Lift, lift, lift, and if you DON'T, you will be eaten by a TIGER! Yes, this is a verbatim quote.
Since the last time I visited a studio was so long ago, I was not sure if invoking tigers to inspire flexibility is a known strategy in the yoga community, but it sure was silly. As I held one leg and wobbled on my other bent knee, I started laughing because I had chosen to do this to myself after all, so let’s strap in and see how bad it is going to get.
The teacher caught my smirk in the mirror, which she did not reflect. I was pretty sure at this point she was going to call my mom and tell her I was screwing around in class, again.
It was so sweaty, and I did not realize how vital a quality yoga mat was for a 105* humid room, so not only was I unable to keep my knees straight or my toes touching, but I was barely able to avoid gliding on my sweat fueled Slip and Slide into my neighbor. I was as scared of a repeat of the SE Yogi Massacre as I was of my stern German teacher.
We did the Cat-Cow combo for a little bit, which is a much less stressful pose but still one that I am only able to accomplish with modifications. While I stretched and contracted my few unfused vertebrae, I heard my teacher talking about how important it is to do yoga every day so that you could quit taking Prozac.
Then she explained that movement in the spine is the most important movement in your body, and if you are too lazy to move your spine? You will have a lesser life. I wondered if there was a way for her to do enough yoga to develop empathy. I wondered if I would rather be empathetic or have killer abs, because right now, the lesson I was learning was that those two notions actually are mutually exclusive.
I was still very aware that the reason for this entire ordeal, being body shamed publicly while trying to fix my body, was because I arrived late and could not inform the teacher of my situation. It was the only reason I didn’t run out of the room crying after 15 minutes.
We came to our final Savasana, where you rest on your back, and the teacher encouraged us to do without props. I laid on my back with no support under my neck, and felt ashamed as my head hovered a few inches off the ground, unable to recline any further. I was an injured freak in a room full of beautiful Coloradans.
I also felt a profound sense of renewal. Every droplet of sweat that thudded onto the mat was sweat I had earned. It was a sense of pride I had never before known, as cleansing as the detox-sweats I had gone through two years earlier. Someday, I was going to redeem myself. I was going to take every single class. I would hit every pose and every cue, or I would snap my neck trying.
As we exited the class, the teacher stood at the front to thank her students and answer any questions. I approached her, thanked her for the class, and apologized profusely for being 3 minutes late.
“Just so you know, my spine is fused; that’s why I couldn’t do the poses like how you wanted.” “Oh, I had no idea! How did that happen? Was it surgery?”
“No, it's a disease. I don’t know. It just happened.”
“How long have you dealt with it?”
This simple question flashed me back to when I sat in the bathtub and came to the conclusion that suicide might be my best option. How deeply do I want to answer this question? How much of my life should I share with her? I started choking up; my voice got low. I looked at the ground and said simply, “25 years.”
“Oh you poor, poor thing, you’ve been carrying this for so long!” She got it. She understood me. And then I awkwardly said, “I gotta go shower.” and ran the fuck outta there
And I think I taught her something that day. I think I taught her that fat people who can’t move have hidden struggles. Maybe she even learned that every single human being is literally doing the best they can, all the time, or else they wouldn’t exist. We’re all made of star stuff. At least I hope she learned something,
Then, I went for coffee with Stephanie, and she roasted me super hard for being late, as I deserved.
Namaste.
Thanks for sharing your story.