Have you ever broken a bone?

Almost.

From the very beginning of school, I envied the kids who showed up with a cast.

They’d walk into class carrying heroic stories about bikes, trees, roller skates, bunkbeds, football matches gone wrong. Usually after spending a glorious few days at home recovering. They wore bright white plaster casts covered in signatures and doodles from the chosen few lucky enough to write on them. The coolest kids even got little drawings.

But the best part?

They were excused from P.E.

I hated P.E. with a kind of dread that settled into my stomach before school even started. In my imagination, the pain of a broken arm could never compare to the pain attached to every single gym class.

I was in a sports-focused school.

Old-school screaming teachers.
Zero athletic talent.
An assistant principal for a mother.
The perfect equation for humiliation.

And somehow, every solution to that equation landed on me.

If the teacher wasn’t yelling, she was trying to drill “talent” into me through punishment exercises. If she wasn’t doing that, she was mocking me. The other kids followed her lead. Children can smell weakness with terrifying precision.

Daily P.E. classes weren’t enough. We also had mandatory sports training before school at 7 a.m. and again after classes. I chose basketball while I still could, mostly because none of the teachers particularly cared about it, which meant they tormented me with slightly less enthusiasm there.

The ball was large enough that the kids couldn’t throw it into my face quite hard enough to truly injure me.

But it was definitely hard enough to turn my ring finger purple and swollen to twice its normal size after one particularly well-aimed hit.

Hallelujah.

No human being has ever rooted harder for a fracture than I did that day.

Still, a swollen finger wasn’t enough for an immediate trip to the emergency room.

“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” my mother said. “Maybe the swelling will go down.”

Inside, I panicked.

Go down?

No, no, no.
Absolutely not.

I silently prayed for that finger to stay fat and purple. Back then, cursing and praying in the same breath didn’t feel contradictory.

But I couldn’t leave something this important entirely in the hands of fate or God.

That evening, alone in my room, I carefully piled books and random heavy objects onto a wooden chair and lowered it directly onto my injured finger.

If it wasn’t broken yet, I thought, then let’s make sure it is.

“You are NOT shrinking by morning, you little traitor.”

I waited there, jaw clenched, for several minutes, hoping for the best.

The next day, I walked into the emergency department with my swollen rainbow-colored finger feeling like I’d won the lottery.

“Felichia!” they called, pronouncing my name wrong as always.

The verdict: cartilage damage.

I remember staring blankly. What the hell was cartilage damage? It sounded far less impressive than a fracture.

Then came the sentence that saved everything.

“We’ll put it in a cast.”

Relief flooded through me.

I was free.

The next morning, I walked into school almost glowing. I didn’t even care that the tiny finger cast only had room for one or two miniature signatures.

During P.E., I sat on the bench at the side of the gym, trying desperately not to smile too visibly.

Then the teacher walked in.

Tiny woman. Huge voice. The kind of authority that filled every corner of a room before she even spoke.

“Line up! Today we’re being tested on long jump. Everyone participates.”

Then her pale blue eyes landed on me.

“But… I have a medical exemption,” I whispered, raising my cast like evidence before a judge.

“That finger doesn’t stop you from jumping,” she snapped. “Get in line before I make you run penalty laps too.”

And that was it.

To this day, I still don’t understand it.

I have never before or since seen anyone with an injured hand forced to do long jump. Girls sat out entire classes with stomach cramps during their periods. I never did.

Physical pain never broke me easily.

Injustice did.

It cut deeper than any injury ever could.

Back then, I didn’t know how to defend myself. I didn’t know how to fight people who seemed determined to crush something inside me simply because they could.

But those moments — the swollen finger, the chair pressing down on it in the dark, the humiliation, the fury, the helplessness — followed me into adulthood.

They shaped me.

They are part of the reason I chose a career where I can stand up for other people when they cannot stand up for themselves.

And every time I fight for a client now, every time I refuse to back down in the face of unfairness, all those old wounds are still there beneath the surface — feeding the fire.

The finger never broke.

Something else did.