Many of you know that I had shoulder surgery last January to repair a ring of detached cartilage and muscle, a volleyball-induced mess that had been keeping me from all of my favorite hobbies and a chunk of my duties as a zookeeper. Though I didn’t know the extent of the injury before the surgery, I’d hoped the surgeon would provide a relatively quick fix—the most likely procedure would require a three-month healing period plus another six to nine months of rehabilitation. It didn’t sound too bad. I felt obligated to quit zookeeping, though, just before the surgery. I couldn’t see a way around it, and besides, wouldn’t it be nice to spend the year of recovery writing?

WRONG. Wrong, wrong, stupid and wrong. It’s been awful, and though I’m much better than I was in, say, mid-July, I’m still worse than I was before the surgery (yeah, you read that right). My bicep burns as I sit here typing. I can’t go back to zookeeping. I can’t play volleyball. I can’t even lift my 3-year-old nephew into a swing.

It sucks, and it’s bothering more than I think it should.

See, I’ve always been a physically strong person, able to hold or lift more weight than could other women I knew. I was no bodybuilder, but I was naturally strong, whether I worked at it or or not. I thought it was part of who I was as a human, part of my intrinsic self. I probably took it for granted, and ironically, that was my downfall, for the doctors tell me that if I’d made an effort to keep my shoulder muscles strong, I might not have injured it in the first place. (Did someone just whisper “hubris”?)

Now, I can’t even do the normal things that everyone else can do. I see it at the zoo: I can’t hold a twenty-five-pound giant rabbit in one arm. I can’t carry two penguins at once. I can’t help load the Indian python into the van. I can’t scrub the floor. And at home: I can’t carry an armful of sticks into the backyard. I can’t move furniture by myself. I can’t run a power drill. I can’t do a simple push-up, to say nothing of a tricep dip or bicep curls.

I am a pale, flabby, unremarkable imitation of my former self, and I hardly know who I am anymore.

People who didn’t know me two years ago don’t know that I used to be strong, and I get this weird, childish urge to tell them how things used to be. But I don’t—or at least I try really hard not to—and this effort to shut up has made me wonder why it matters so much to me that people understand that I’m only temporarily weak. I mean, I know humans aren’t strong forever. I know that old age would have taken my strength away eventually. I know I should never have allowed myself to place so much stock in something so fleeting. But it’s clear now that however unwise it was for me to let it happen, my self-image was based on my physical strength. Now that it’s gone, I feel bereft, undefined, like I’m not entirely myself.

So I’ve been wondering, what remains after the thing you believe is the foundation of your self turns out to be nothing more than a construct of youth and arrogance?

What’s left? Well, after much thought, I’ve decided that I’m still here, and maybe I’m stronger than I was before that last volleyball swing. Maybe I’m a better person now that I’m not relying upon external character traits to tell me what I’m worth. For as much as I enjoyed and was comforted by my physical strength, it wasn’t the best of me. It didn’t help me to take in foster cats. It didn’t help me make friends when I moved to a new town. And it surely wasn’t the thing that kept my butt in the chair and my brain connected to my stories as I pecked out my first two novels.

My physical self isn’t my internal self, as connected and difficult to disengage as they may seem.

And that, my fellow romance writing friends, is where this little confessional begins to apply to our craft. This self-reflection has me thinking about myself abstractly, like I’m some disillusioned character in one of my books. (I think it’s a little easier to take the analysis when I remove myself from my self for a bit.) As writers, we create heroes and heroines with well-rounded sets of characteristics, both tangible and intangible. We know their hair color, their height, their eye color. Shoe size, too. But that merely describes them; it doesn’t define who they are.

Certainly, a character may think of herself in physical terms (as I clearly have). Perhaps it’s important to your heroine that she has curly red hair. Perhaps she acts in accordance with how people with curly red hair are reputed to act. But would she be a different person without that hair? If she lost it through chemotherapy, perhaps, or merely by the natural thinning and graying of age, would her nature change? Would she see herself in the mirror as a different woman? Would some subtler self emerge, or would she remain as she always was, as the redhead within? Does it turn out that the hair give her confidence to be bold, or was it really nothing more than hair to her? Would she have been the same women if she’d been born a brunette?

I really don’t know, because I don’t know your heroine. But you must. You must understand how your character’s physical appearance impacts her emotional world, whether sensible or not. After all, people aren’t very sensible, and while I know that fiction isn’t reality, I think that this often unspoken balance between internal and external selves is a mine worth exploring in our novels.

Try this exercise: pick your character’s most defining physical trait, whether positive or negative—hair, height, weight, whatever. Let them have it for a while, let them grow accustomed to it, and then rip it from them. See what happens. See if they change. I’d wager that you’ll learn something about the guts of your characters if you do.

And a question for your comments….do you have a physical trait that you think defines you? How would you feel if you lost it?