Dear Lower Back,
I owe you an apology.
Not a quick "my bad" apology. A real one. A sit-down, look-you-in-the-eyes apology.
For roughly 12 years, I treated you like the one team member nobody ever checks in on. Everyone was worried about the shoulders, the neck, the wrists. You were just back there, holding everything up, quietly suffering, saying nothing.
You tried to tell me. Remember 2019? The morning I reached for my coffee mug and something went twang and I had to lay on the kitchen floor for 20 minutes? I told my wife I was "stretching." She knew. You knew. I knew. We all knew.
Did I take the hint? I did not.
I bought a lumbar pillow for my terrible chair and called it a solution. The pillow was doing your job, which is like hiring someone to carry your groceries and then wondering why your arms are getting weaker. I was outsourcing your entire workload to a $22 piece of memory foam from Amazon.
I want you to know that things are different now.
When I got the standing desk, you came back online slowly. Like a computer that's been asleep so long it has to reinstall updates. It hurt. I won't lie to you… it hurt a lot at first. But that was just you remembering what you were built to do. You are load-bearing infrastructure. You are essential personnel. You are, frankly, carrying a lot and I have not been grateful enough.
These days, I think about you. I stand in the morning. I do the exercises. I stretch before bed. My wife says I stand "like a person" now, instead of the hunched over alien, which is maybe the nicest thing she's said to me this year.
I know we have more work to do. I know I still slump sometimes when I'm tired. I know movie night is basically an hour of you screaming at me from inside the couch cushions.
But I see you now. And I'm sorry. And I'm showing up.
Yours (obviously, literally), Freddie
P.S. To my neck: you're next. I haven't forgotten about you. Please stop popping like that.
Drop a comment if your back has also been trying to reach you about your extended warranty. You are not alone.