Itto Outini

Itto Outini is an author, book coach, Fulbright Scholar, Steinbeck Fellow, and MacDowell Fellow. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The North American Review, Jewish Life Magazine, The Fulbright Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, and she’s spoken for organizations including Cal Tech University, Verizon Wireless, The International Trade Centre, and the United Nations. Itto and her husband, Mekiya Outini, are collaborating on several books and running a full-service author support platform, The DateKeepers, dedicated to helping high achievers tell their stories and giving writers the tools to succeed. Itto holds an MA in journalism and strategic media from the University of Arkansas.

Easy read of the essay in the images above:

The Lazy Angel

The running joke at the school for the blind in Meknes, Morocco, where I studied from 2007 to 2013, was that whenever someone needed a question answered, they should simply hit me on the head, as one might slap an old washing machine, and out the answer would come. This started the day my math teacher, frustrated by my hemming and hawing, struck me on the head with his car keys, causing me to cough up a correct answer that I hadn’t known moments earlier and startling everyone, even myself. 

I never cared for this joke, not because I wasn’t used to getting hit—I was—but because I’ve always gone to great lengths to protect the precious cargo in my skull. My back and buttocks weathered countless beatings from aunts, uncles, cousins, and during my six years of homelessness, strangers. My thighs still bear the marks of cigarette burns. I’ve tumbled down stairs and off third-story balconies. I’ve been gang-raped and passed exams hours later. I’ve slept on rocks and in the snow. Giant tumors were removed from my hip just weeks before I defended my master’s thesis. The remains of my damaged eyes were carved from my skull and replaced with prostheses days before I packed up my entire life and relocated to another city. The morning before the Fulbright Program interviewed me to determine whether I should be selected as a grantee, my right shin was scalded by a portable stove, placed in my way by a jealous neighbor. 

In short, I’m no stranger to pain. 

That said, with the exception of the sharp object thrown at my face when I was seventeen, which destroyed my right eye and robbed me of sight, I’ve managed to keep my head more or less out of harm’s way. When I was young, my parents died, my relatives abandoned me, and I found myself alone in the world. My brain became my one and only ally. Thanks to my brain, I survived on the streets, then escaped them. I ran the gauntlet of Morocco’s rigorous education system. I immigrated to and thrived in the United States. Without my brain, I would be nowhere and nothing. You can beat, stab, scald, or slice off any other part of me, but I’ll never let you near my brain. 

Needless to say, after more than three decades of playing bodyguard to my gray matter, my body isn’t as strong as it once was. These days, I live with chronic pain caused by osteoarthritis, sciatica, and pigmented villonodular synovitis (PVNS), a chimeric condition, now thought to be a trauma-induced variant of arthritis, but with certain cancerous qualities. The pain has not let up since it began abruptly one day in eleventh grade. Maybe it was there before, but I never noticed it, too focused on survival to attend to the army of knives marching into my hip and making camp there. But then they started chopping. 

The onset was sudden. I was sitting in class. It had rained on me the night before, and it was still raining, a cold, insidious, mid-winter drizzle drumming on the classroom windows. My blouse was dry, having spent the night in a plastic bag, but that bag wasn’t big enough for the rest of me. The cold had soaked through my flesh to my bones. 

When it started, I was taken by surprise. I’d experienced agonizing pain before, but always in response to a clear and immediate stimulus. This time, it seemed to be coming from nowhere. Alarmed, I began to squirm, whimpering and wriggling in my chair. 

“What’s wrong with you?” the teacher wanted to know. 

I asked if I could leave class early and go to the doctor. The pain was too much to bear. 

He said, “I have a solution for you.” 

I thought he was going to let me go, maybe even wish me a rapid recovery. Instead, he took me by the arm, led me to the classroom door, and pushed me out into the rain. “If you’re going to lie for attention,” he said, “then you might as well listen from here.” Then he went back inside to finish his lecture. 

Tears of shock ran down my cheeks, and tears of indignation, and tears of pain, and all these tears together mingled with the rain. The teacher’s words frightened me more than the pain. What if he was right? I wondered. I wasn’t pretending, at least not as far as I knew, but I had no idea where the pain might be coming from, and it was true that I needed attention. I was alone in the world. What if my body was generating a phantom pain in hopes of attracting the kindness and care that I desperately craved? If that were the case, I would never forgive my own nervous system, for in a bid to capture more emotional support, it was running the risk of undermining my academic career, the only lifeline that I had. 

Many years later, two giant tumors would be found in my hip. These would turn out to be caused by PVNS, meaning that they were benign—in the most technical sense of that word, that is: incapable of metastasizing, though still very capable of causing pain—but initially, all the MRI showed were two bulbous growths lodged in the joint. 

“We don’t know what these are,” the doctor told me gravely, standing in the hall. “They may be cancerous. We’re still waiting for the labs to come back.” 

I’m sure she expected me to burst into tears. Instead, I shouted, “Awesome! That’s great news! That means I’m not making it up after all!” 

In the weeks that followed, I underwent an orthoscopic surgery in hopes of removing the tumors and relieving the pain. The only guarantee the doctors could offer was that the operation would demolish my immune system and leave me with scars, but I nevertheless remained cheerful. Even if it the tumors were terminal cancer, I’d have died happy, knowing that I’d been fighting to the very end. 

That affirmation was still many years away, however, the day my eleventh-grade teacher made me stand in the rain. 

Though I’d had the presence of mind to grab my Braille typewriter, a long, flat piece of plastic, like a ruler, with holes for a stylus to punch out dots, I couldn’t take notes. The rain would’ve melted the paper. The knives were chopping deeper, harder, faster, but I knew the teacher would give us a quiz on this material, so I forced myself to listen. I pulled myself together and focused on his voice. I pushed the agonizing pain to the periphery. I turned myself into a tape recorder. 

Sure enough, on Thursday, he announced that there would be a quiz. He made me sit at an empty table, far from my peers, so that they couldn’t whisper answers to me. Later, I would learn that he’d given them the questions in advance, encouraged them to memorize responses, and forbidden them from telling me. My complaints had irritated him. He wanted me to fail. 

It should be acknowledged that his cruelty was not his fault. The other blind students often feigned illnesses to get out of class, and he had no reason to believe that I was any different. If I revealed that I was homeless to anyone at school, I’d been warned by the director the year I’d enrolled, I would face immediate expulsion. A few of my teachers had figured it out for themselves, but I didn’t dare share my secrets with those who had not. The director didn’t want me there at all, fearful that having an Amazigh orphan around might undermine the reputation of his institution, and he didn’t want his teachers feeling sorry for me or helping me in any way. Misunderstandings like this one were precisely what he’d hoped for. 

He’d miscalculated, though. He didn’t know my strength. I’d gone three nights without sleeping, enduring hip pain, another sexual assault, and freezing rain, but I was more alert than ever, ready to prove my skeptics wrong. 

My teacher read the questions off his paper quickly, too quickly for me to keep up. On the spot, while writing down the questions, I invented my own shorthand. I heard the smirk in his voice when I handed in those four pages of nonsense along with my answers. “Lazy angel,” he muttered, a Darija expression roughly equivalent to the English “drama queen,” though harsher: the drama queen might have a genuine grievance, which she blows out of proportion, but the lazy angel must invent her miseries from whole cloth. The teacher stuffed my papers into his bag and left, satisfied that I had failed. 

The following week, he handed back my four sheets of nonsense and my correct answers grudgingly admitted that I had come first in the class. 

“You’re clever,” he told me under his breath. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Just stop pretending. It’s a disgusting way to get attention. On Monday, be ready to sit still and learn.” 

That day, I realized two things: first, that I would have to keep secret the invisible knives that were turning my hips into mincemeat if I was to be respected by the world; and second, that no matter how bad it got, I didn’t have to let it stop me. 

I didn’t even have to let it slow me down. 

These days, the pain and I coexist in wary symbiosis. The army of knives enjoys free rein throughout my body, but it leaves my brain alone. Its primary residence extends from my hips to my thighs, but it often invites its friends over, and they party all night in my back and my knees. Sometimes, the knives go on vacation, making luxury resorts of my other joints and muscle groups and nerves. Occasionally, they even send their envoys up my spine to the sovereign state of my skull. For several months in 2024, the pain maintained a permanent embassy in one of my upper left molars after a bungling dentist cracked the root of the tooth. While this diplomatic mission was in progress, I took no time off from building my business with my husband. I met with clients. I formulated outreach strategies. I taught myself marketing. I gave interviews to the media. I read the entire US tax code. The weekend the pain became so acute that my husband, tired of my blanket condemnation of dentists, went over my head and booked an appointment with a provider recommended by a family member—he proved honest and competent, and I am grateful—I conceptualized and outlined an entire novel. 

The people who beat me will not stop me. The people who betrayed me will not stop me. The people who left me to die on the streets will not stop me. The people who raped me will not stop me. The people who accused me of faking my pain will not stop me. And the pain itself will not stop me. Ever. 

I do my best work while in pain. 

This essay is no different. It’s 3:00 a.m., my head is pounding, my eyes are burning, and my cheeks are salty. I slept for all of fifteen minutes before the commander of the knives blew his trumpet and they all started chopping. Something—a chilly draught, a subtle depression in the mattress, a fragment of tomato accidentally consumed—has sent the pain rampaging. Before going to bed, my husband asked if I wanted a full-body massage, as he often does, but this time, I refused. Massages do help sometimes, especially when we use CBD oil, but tonight, I had other plans. I’d already outlined this essay, and I didn’t want to lose momentum. If the pain subsided prematurely, I feared that my inspiration might desert me. I might sit down to write and find that I would rather read a book, or listen to music, or scroll on social media—all far more enjoyable activities than reliving one’s suffering through writing, unless writing itself becomes the only possible distraction from that suffering. There will be time for massages tomorrow. Tonight, if I am to finish this essay, I need the pain on my side, doing double duty as subject and muse. 

Don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not a masochist. Most nights, I sleep on the floor instead of the bed because this, for some reason, helps to realign my joints and mitigate the inflammation. Day and night, outdoors and in, I wear layers, prompting my husband to ask if I’ve implemented my “Three-Pants Approach” whenever we venture outside in cold weather. Year round, I keep the indoor temperature at 77 degrees. My husband sweats and grumbles, but does not touch the thermostat until I’ve gone to bed and wrapped myself in still more layers. I often force myself to drink an anti-inflammatory concoction that we’ve somewhat euphemistically dubbed “The Bad Tea.” I’ve even made draconian dietary sacrifices, cutting out gluten, potatoes, peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes and radically reducing my intake of red meat, cane sugar, ultra-processed foods, and cheese. 

This last measure may not prove that I am not a masochist, but it does illustrate the lengths to which I’ll go to beat the pain. To me, however, beating the pain does not mean banishing the pain, for banishment is not always possible. Beating the pain means not letting it stop me. Sometimes, it means ceding my body while my mind carries on. 

Lazy angel, my teacher called me. He was confident, but wrong. My own blood relations have caused me more pain than anybody else, but they also knew me better. They called me a hardworking devil. I am. 

I used to hide the pain. I used to play it off as if more than two decades of violence and exposure to the elements could leave a body in mint condition. Some doubted my story, even going so far as to question my blindness, and while I was frustrated by this skepticism, it was something I could understand. I’m a journalist myself, after all. I, too, would have questions. 

Stunningly, however, others believed me—perhaps because they never experienced such things themselves, perhaps because they never dared imagine them, but mostly, I think, because they themselves were used to looking for excuses, and if they had an excuse like my pain, they never would’ve worked a day in their lives. It’s difficult for a mind thus configured to fathom that somebody might choose to work despite the pain. Likewise, it’s difficult for educators, used to dealing with hypochondriacs and liars, to recognize genuine pain when they see it. It’s difficult for employers, accustomed to hiring and firing the lazy, to believe that anyone with chronic pain might find a way to turn it to their company’s advantage. It’s difficult for the public to see those of us with damaged bodies as anything other than burdensome when so many who remain unscathed subsist on excuses and refuse to pay dues to the system.

I used to hide my pain because I didn’t want to give those skeptics any reason not to let me prove myself. I was determined to show the world what I could do despite the pain. This, I’ve done. I no longer feel compelled to hide because the business that I’ve built, the academic and artistic accolades I’ve earned, the stories that I’ve written, and the brutalities I’ve overcome speak for themselves. 

The point of this essay is not to solicit your pity. I’ve made it this far without any extra allowances. I want no accommodations. I’m writing this with one goal in mind, only one: to break my silence on this subject, finally, and tell the truth. 

Truth-telling is its own reward. 

END