What do you picture when you hear “healing isn’t linear?”
Learning the same lesson again and again
Every time I think I’m getting a handle on health stuff – getting my meat sack to cooperate in all things – something slips out of balance and suddenly I’m at a newer, weirder square one. In this case, about a month ago I decided to start running (jogging, really), trying out a couch-to-5k program. How amazing, I thought smugly to myself, if on top of everything else, I start running.
I only went on five runs. I loved how they made me feel. I loved escaping my desk a bit too early to chase down the fading sunlight in a fading winter afternoon. I loved wearing only a sweatshirt in the 40 degree weather, and making my own heat.1 I loved the realization that perhaps I had hated running for all those years in school simply because I was running too fast, in an attempt to keep up with the other (faster) kids. How amazing to learn that I could go at my own pace.
But then, but then, as always, something snaps out of place. A bunch of small things compounded and then reached their breaking point, and I’m facing yet another somewhat-serious-and-very-frustrating health thing. I caught it early, it can be managed, but yet again I have to redraw the bounds of my own bodily experience and expectation. At times it feels like a perpetually shrinking window.
So again I go from feeling the strongest I’ve ever been, or that I’ve felt for a while, vital even, to feeling weak and uncertain and ashamed. The new health thing comes in and out of focus in the first few weeks; as I write this it’s currently worse again, after feeling almost unnoticeable last week.
How long until I’m better? I know there’s no answer to this, as much as I believe that knowing would make everything more bearable. This is the gut punch of chronic illness, the lesson I am always learning. I want things to be clear, either this or that, never or always. I have such a hard time with the murk, the gray, the in-between. It gets worse and better and better and worse, and I am still waiting for an emphatic yes or no.
Right now, I can still powerlift, but differently than I did before.2 I don’t know about running. I see people jogging down the community path in our neighborhood, floating above the concrete in the almost-spring evenings, and I am full of envy and resignation.
What do you see when you hear the phrase “healing isn’t linear?” It occurs to me that of all things, I picture… a line. A line, jagged with ups and downs, but on balance trending up. This is certainly part of the problem.
Instead, I realized while talking to my very thoughtful friend Christina this last week (SF peeps, check out her wonderful newsletter
), a better way to conceptualize this is that it’s dynamic, always in flux. It’s not always going to be as bad as it felt the first five days, when I was in extreme physical discomfort while trying to imagine the most extreme implications down the road. It’s not always going to be as easy as it was last week, when I was barely noticing it. It just is going to be what it is, one day at a time, grief and fear aside.3Last night I had a dream that I was in a quilt class, but it was also a dance class, and I danced with ease among strangers, moving joyfully through galleries where our quilts hung on the walls.4 Recently I spoke with a colleague about missing dance, which I do, but more than that I miss my body’s enthusiastic cooperation in the tasks I set for it:
You think, point!, and your foot arches. Or, goodnight!, and you’re waking up eight hours later. Or, be calm!, and your heart rate slows. The best thing about running was freedom in movement, and the confidence that my body was strong enough to take me where I wanted to go. That may be true at some point in the future, but for now, it’s not. So now to seek some freedoms elsewhere.
The Sew Zone
My machine came back from the shop right when we got back from California, but unfortunately the auto thread cutter was still not working so back to the shop it went. I got one lovely afternoon of sewing in. I am more than a little bummed to not be able to work on the ideas I have rattling around, especially when I have to slow down in other areas.
Watching/Reading/Eating
Watching
Too much tv, specifically reality tv, specifically The Batchelor and Love is Blind. Clay eating soup on a beach in the DR was maybe my favorite moment from S6 LiB.
Dune 2 — I can’t remember the last time I was so excited for a movie!
Madame Web. Yes, we saw Madame Web on Valentine’s Day and it was great.
Draft Day, inexplicably5
TikToks about Kate Middleton
my Link traverse Hyrule in TOTK. I’ve been putting in HOURS on this and I need to stop but I also love it so much.
Reading
Currently reading The Book of Love by Kelly Link which is wonderful and weird and sad and funny. Thinking about coins which are cups and sometimes knives and sometimes ribs, and about the ways writing is magic.
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. I really had no idea just how bad the Sackler story is.
North Woods by Daniel Mason. I loved it.
Patricia wants to cuddle by Samantha Allen. Fun! Lesbian/Batchelor/Sasquatch/crime romp.
Eating
Crispy rice. I just want to eat crispy rice. Made this with previously frozen rice last week and it was delicious. Oops, just made it again for dinner.
xoxo
mvp
Not unlike how the kangaroo mouse makes his own water in the desert ;)
Yesterday I tried some light barbell squats, gritting against everything I learned about bracing in the last few years to learn a new strategy around pressure management: inhale on the way down, exhale on the way up. The Valsalva is no longer for me.
I would read thousands of words on experiencing fear as a chronically ill person. It is powerful and real and sometimes very unhelpful but sometimes incredibly adaptive. It gets discarded too often, I think — sometimes it keeps me safe, but sometimes it does nothing good whatsoever.
If you are spotting the Cody Cook-Parrott influence here, yes, me too. Quilt class was a highlight of the fall, for me!
It actually is incredibly explicable. Our movie system is just a rotation in which we take turns picking the movie, to avoid consensus. Draft Day was one of Tim’s picks and I kinda loved it?!