We All Fall Down
I’ve seriously been falling down on the job with this blog. At first I took a bit of a mental vacation and then a physical one. My lengthy hiatus from blogging is the result of a number of factors: workout inconveniences, an injury, and a new focus on mind training as well as body. Of course, none of these constitute a good excuse.
1.) My gym, which is under new ownership, has been closed for renovations since the end of February. As a result my workouts have been spotty at best. And lifting has pretty much been off the menu. I tried lifting at both of the temporary gyms I was using in other parts of town and both were unsatisfactory. One was way too crowded, and another had uneven floor tiles which made me very uncomfortable balance wise. I haven’t visited my newly reopened gym yet–that’s on today’s agenda–but I am hoping it avoids both of these pitfalls.
2.) I’ve been literally falling down on the job. Since my last round of shots in June, I’ve developed a falling problem again. We moved some things around in the hopes of solving some thigh and hip pain, and somehow disturbed an equilibrium somewhere else. I’m averaging about one or two good face-plants a week. One of which landed me in the ER for the first time in my adult life with an “unintentional stabbing” in my left palm. Oops. That’ll teach me to carry a water glass in bare feet when I *know* there is a tripping problem. Four stitches later, I’m pretty much back to normal and can get back to the gym today.
Otherwise my gait is good, and the hip pain is pretty much gone. So I just need to hang tight until I go for PT and they can analyze my gait and figure out what the issue is. It’s frustrating and I’ve been dealing with some anger and guilt about it. Yeah, I know: stupid. I know intellectually it isn’t my fault; but every time it happens I feel guilty and ashamed, like if I only tried harder it wouldn’t happen. I’m working on getting over it. We tried something new, and it wasn’t such a hot idea. . .lesson learned.
It’s a difficult thing, this irrational guilt and shame. Somewhere along the line, I latched on to the idea that if I worked hard I could eradicate the effects of the CP. Really, all anyone–my PTs, my doctor, my parents–wanted was to encourage me to work as hard as I could to mitigate the effects and increase my chances of success. But for some reason the message got garbled. And what’s worse: I made the dangerous mistake of believing that the inverse (converse?!) was also true: if I don’t succeed in defying the CP, I am a failure. They meant: We know this hurts/is difficult, but try as hard as you can, and you can reduce the impact of CP and do more things with your life. I heard: Work hard, no matter how much it hurts or what it costs you, and you can make this go away. If it doesn’t go away, work harder. If it still doesn’t go away, you aren’t working hard enough and it’s your fault.
It’s psychotic. I know it. I’ve talked about it before and it frustrates me to no end after all I have read and learned about CP and how it works that the irrational voice still has this much power. The desire to quiet that voice and derail some of these negative and patently destructive thought patterns brings me to the third reason for my hiatus.
3.) We know that I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to retrain my body so that it functions and feels better, but in recent weeks I’ve been devoting increasing amounts of time to retraining my mind as well. Just like 30 years of an abnormal gait pattern wore on my joints and led to increasing amounts of pain and dysfunction in my body, so too have 30 years of destructive thought processes affected my mind and my spirit. In my next couple posts I am going to talk more about my recent forays into creative visualization, mindfulness and meditation.
No, I did not become a crystal-rubbing hippie in that last couple weeks. I can’t abide patchouli. I’m deeply skeptical of vague talk about energy in the world and the flow of the universe, and I have a low tolerance for BS. This is my search for practical ways to bring my mind and body together in a way that makes me healthier–and happier. So stick with me, ok?
I totally relate to #2. I think it is really really common for people with chronic health issues of any kind that stretch back to childhood. I got the “let her do what she feels able to do” advice from my doctor (to my parents) and turned that into – “if I do more than I am able to do, I beat the disease, the disease doesn’t beat me.” Well that works, until it doesn’t. My body is sadly paying the price now for softball games I had no business pitching and a host of sports I shouldn’t have attempted as my back screamed at me to stop. It was irrational at the time, and I knew it, but it was personal. I kept thinking it was a mind over matter thing and I could just will the disease into submission. It really doesn’t work that way and at some point your body just refuses to cooperate and just like you said it feels like a crushing failure. It’s not. I get that. You get that. But getting it rationally and internalizing it in a meaningful way are really different things. I still struggle with it. Cheesy though it may be, I kind of call the “accept what you cannot change” piece of the serenity prayer to mind when I get down about it. I can change a lot of things, some with hard work, some with better self care, but I cannot obliterate my disease and make it go away. I can manage it. If you get to a place of insight on really buying into it completely and not struggling with the feelings of personal failure, I’d love to hear about it – I am not all the way there yet myself.