Little body, huge life: How Suchita Smith has learnt to dance her way through disability

Standing at 137cm high (about four-foot-five), Suchita Smith describes herself as "a little person with a huge life". And part of that hugeness has meant dance.

In dancing, she says, she finds "a profound joy of being in my body, it's helped me love and tune into it, feel its beauty and become embodied".

This has been the case even though, for decades, she has struggled to walk and stand; after having her hips and knees replaced in her 40s, she can now walk half a kilometre, but standing often hurts.

Suchita was born with Pseudoachondroplasia, a degenerative condition that leads to short stature and badly-formed joints, causing significant chronic pain, like arthritis. Her bones can easily dislocate.

Yet still, she radiates a kind of stubborn joy, an openness to the world. As physical limitations have taken hold of her body, she has learnt to find other ways to dance — as a DJ, in a chair, in the water, whilst swimming.

Suchita was dressed head to toe in red when I met her earlier this year at the Margaret River Writers festival, wielding a walking stick and a big grin. 

I was acutely conscious of what it had cost her to come — anything adventurous, she later wrote, usually resulted in dislocation in her neck, slamming her with headaches and fatigue for weeks. But, she insisted and, whilst battling vertigo, travelled from Perth.

The Queen of Adaptation

In the community of Fremantle, WA, Suchita Smith is a local legend. Her friends call her the Queen of Adaptation. As the demands of her body have become more severe over the years, she has adapted, created and re-adapted. 

As a young environmental scientist facing an almost all-male culture and the physical difficulties of moving through the bush, she created a management plan for the Yanchep and Walpole-Nornalup national parks. When forced to leave environmental science due to bodily constraints, she hosted a radio show called Full Circle on Perth Community Radio, which explored spirituality and wellbeing.

But the place she really came to learn to be, or feel free, was behind a DJ's decks.

Suchita established "Zorba's Dance Club", creating a community that cemented around a popular monthly event featuring themes and wild costumes. But after a decade, nerve damage in her neck impacted her speech, the physical toll of setting up heavy DJ equipment mounted and she needed to give up the work and start again.

When I first began writing this Staying Upright series exploring resilience, people who knew Suchita immediately emailed me and implored me to talk to her. Her friend Nicki de Hoog wrote:

Suchi is a light to us all in our Fremantle community. She drives her modified car to the pool every day. She has as many body sessions as she can afford, to keep active, after her many surgical interventions. Although I've seen her discouraged, angry at times, and disappointed, I've never heard her feeling sorry for herself, although I think I'd be screaming with fury at some of the things she has had to overcome. She has a great sense of humour, a deep and meaningful spiritual life, and a resilience I've seldom encountered in anybody else.

You understand, when you meet her, how wise Suchita is, and how insistent on joy. I was eager to understand what sustained her.

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'I've become more silent'

Suchita told me that for her, the most powerful way of dealing with pain, and the way to "inner peace", is acceptance.

"Coming to acceptance doesn't mean I don't rail against the latest misfortune at the beginning," she says, "but bringing in the element of, 'This is how it is right now' and embracing that, helps to lessen the stress and anxiety. Helps me more calmly face what is happening."

What has caused her the most grief, she says, is the more recent damage to her vocal cords and tongue nerves, which has impacted her ability to talk with people and find employment. She says: "I went from having a well-trained, strong voice, which was an important part of presenting my radio show for 15 years, to having a hoarse, breathy voice with some sounds no longer clear. Speaking now takes more effort to be heard and understood, especially in noisy places. I've become more silent."

Now she creates slideshows for funerals and other life events, pairing music to photographs in her Celebrate a Life business, and has been working on final edits to her memoir.

Undergirding her days, is a determination not to be bowed by serial griefs, by a body in pain.

Suchita's experience is like that of so many other Australians who manage to live and work through considerable physical obstacles and chronic illnesses, whose stories are rarely told, whose strength is rarely acknowledged. People in communities across the country who contain deep pots of hard-earned wisdom.

So what has sustained Suchita? A caring community. Friends who hug her. And a strong spirit, which she nurtures. "Invaluable in the toughest times is being able to connect to my deep spirit which nothing on the outside can touch," she says. "It gives me clarity, peace and inner freedom."

You can't always will away pain with cheer

But she also emphasises the need to have a good cry. "Sometimes the best thing to do in the midst of hard times is to give up and not cope for a while," she says. "During my 10 weeks in hospital, [after she tripped over and fractured her knee and, then, during surgery her femur was broken] I cried more than I had over the last 20 years. I rarely cry but boy, I needed to release a lot of angst, heartbreak, frustration, weariness and worry, and then I was more able to carry on with greater equanimity."

It can be counter-productive, she argues, to try to move through pain by trying to cheer up. "I found the way to deal with sadness, and any other powerful emotion, is simply feel it, let it in, be with it … then I am able to move on or I may just get a break when I'm interacting with someone, or when engrossed in my work."

When she is really struggling, she digs deep. "I feel like we develop strength and courage muscles the more we use them. Mine have had many good workouts and every time I've had to dig deep into my determination, to summon my strength to keep going, they are there to help me get through."

One curious part of the body positivity movement is how rarely it seems to feature or focus on people with disability; researchers acknowledge that "body image in individuals with visible physical disabilities appears to be an important area of research and investigation, [but it] has received little attention over the years."

When I asked Suchita about this, she was typically generous, saying she celebrates "anyone's attempts to feel better about themselves, whatever shape and size they are".

"For all its faults social media is allowing people with different bodies to be out there and proud, including myself," she says. "It wasn't easy for me to show all of me in photos (after 45 years of only having photos from the waist up) — it was another level of self-acceptance to reach, but now I don't give it a second thought."

Self-love in action

She also follows lots of other people with disabilities who share their "physical wins and difficulties" with courage and audacity. "Finally we have a little more power to challenge norms, we aren't only reliant on the mainstream ideas of beauty. I see this as revolutionary."

But, she says: "I think loving our bodies is a challenge for us all, especially in a society that worships only certain kinds of beauty. It is an even greater challenge when we are very different from the norm or have one that brings hardship and physical and emotional pain to our lives.

"Despite this, I've ended up truly feeling my own beauty from within … I feel good in my body, despite the pain and limitations it brings me, because it is fit and strong within its capacity. It feels alive and vital from exercising — exercising is self-love in action. This has helped me find peace with it, to forgive it the discomfort and limitations and have the motivation to actively take good care of it."

In any life, big or small, often happiness comes down to the simplest of joys.

When I ask Suchita where she finds it, she says: "Connecting with loved ones, contributing to my community, dancing, swimming, live music, nature, ocean, sunsets, sitting in my back courtyard looking up to the sky in the evening, my magic garden and seeing the birds and other wildlife in it, chocolate ice cream and my morning coffee bring me big joys and little joys."

Suchita's walking stick is made of a mallee root. She calls it her best friend. It comes from the eucalyptus trees known for being small, slow growing and tough, surviving in dry soil. (The name comes from the Aboriginal word mali, meaning water.) Their root systems run very deep — they have been found at depths of 28 metres — and when fires scorch them, or cattle graze too closely, the trees draw on the water deep in the soil, for strength and renewal to re-spout. 

This, too, Suchita has learned to do.

Source: ABC