This injury continues to humble me. That is how I am choosing to classify it so I don’t think about the trapped feeling in my body that makes a claustrophobic panic throb in my chest. I am forcing myself to consider it a continued teacher, making me confront my addictive nature, utter lack of patience, and criticality of myself.
To reestablish its dominance, the injury has migrated, climbing from the hamstring attachment at the base of my buttcheek up to my sciatic nerve. The blooming pain and lack of my mobility in my lower back transports me directly back to each horrible contraction when my son’s skull crushed that nerve during delivery. An injury I thought I had already recovered from.
The combination of all these injuries is teaching me there is no such thing as recovery. They are reminding me that there is no getting “there.” It is all one continuous journey, in which the contributions of the past are ever present. And it stupid to try and ignore them.
I am being punished for my lack of patience. I tried to loophole my way out of rest. If it’s not aggravating it, I can keep going. That doesn’t hurt worse, so it’s fine. Sure, I can start my double workout days again.
Addict.
Only I could find a way to overdose on being healthy; only someone like me could push self-care into self-harm.
It seems like such an easy thing, to take a break, to rest. It should certainly be easier than working so hard, cramming workouts in at every opportunity, pushing my body until it literally breaks. Yet my mind is so entrenched in the habit. I am so completely dependent on the routine. I don’t know how to not do it.
I think I had partially convinced myself that I was OK, that I was mentally recovered because my outlets had become “healthy.” The symptomology became masked by the positive classification. However, it turns out that the underlying behavior has not evolved at all. Instead, it has only become more clever at hiding in plain sight.
It felt good thinking I had finally channeled my damage into healthy outlets, that I had finally figured that part of myself out. The idea that it was all my disorder tricking and manipulating me is wholly undermining and disconcerting. It shakes something about what I thought I knew about myself. And maybe that is the point: to remind me and shock me back out of complacency.
In my mind, I have been concocting an illusory correlation for this injury, repeating it in my brain until it sound true. I keep thinking to myself that I encouraged it. Immediately prior to my injury, I was having self-harm ideation.
It was a strange experience. When I actively self-harmed, I would cut or burn myself impulsively. It was a spontaneous and desperate coping mechanism to escape or change the emotional pain I was feeling. Yet, these recent thoughts I found creeping in my brain were calm. I found myself thinking about hurting myself or having a wound fondly. However, I was not depressed. I was not suffering; I did not need it as an out. More, I wanted to injury for a sense of familiarity, almost from an anthropological perspective of wanting to see what it would be like and how I would respond again. It was some sort of deformed nostalgia.
It was never an impulse I was in danger of acting on. There was no panic, no desperation, no distorted thoughts. Even as these strange ideas were bobbed in my head, I had the sanity to know that if I actually had these injuries I seemed to suddenly be courting, I would immediately hate them and everything they involved. I knew better.
I brushed it off as simply old issues surfacing and resolving in my head. I acknowledged them and watched them spiral out of sight. I only really talked to one person about it, as the idea of explaining to people I wanted to be hurt without wanting to be hurt seemed daunting. Then I let it go.
Then, what seemed like the next day, I pulled my hamstring. It feels like I invited it. It feels like I deserved it for having those old strains writhing back in my brain. I feel like I did this to myself (beyond literally doing it to myself by overtraining).
Or this is just me turning on myself. Finding more of a way to punish myself for not working out to quota. As always.
I have been in pretty consistent and, at times, intense pain for almost a week now. I have been living in KT tape for 3 days, not to exercise but just to function at all. Pain always inevitably pushes me into depression. And I have been cycling harder in that direction, with awkward pockets of mania most likely stemming from the workouts I should not be doing.
Now, the injury feels more psychological than anything. The pain and the problem is clearly physical (and persistent), yet my experience of it has shifted up to my mind and emotions. After over two months, it seems like I am learning the same core life lesson I keep relearning a hundred ways. I have to let go and just go with it, accept things as they are and adapt. I keep surrendering to this epiphany in one context then forgetting it in the next. As if any life experience could be an island.
It needs to stick this time. I need to implant the idea in the center of my brain so my body can stop teaching me that I am her bitch. And I am so completely her bitch.
I need to shift perspective. Per usual. Out of my broken negativity. Instead of dwelling on the pain and what I SHOULD be doing and what my body SHOULD be able to do, I need to remember to appreciate what I do have. Any physical ability is always a gift, never guaranteed (just like happiness in the mind).
Even more specifically, I need to honor how far my body has come for me in the past two years. I would have killed to be here as I shambled around after having my son.
I need to stop trying to be thinner and faster and stronger and more whatever the hell attribute I fixate on at the moment and actually be what I am (just like trying to be sane when I’m beautifully crazy), actually accept and love what I am. It can be worse; it has been worse. Lament never changes circumstance, only squanders it.
I know all of these things! I know better. I made all these realizations about my mind years ago. When will I extend these lessons to my body? When will I stop being so hateful to the physical? I have not changed from the teenager who loathed her young and slender body only to look back years later with regret. I squandered my youth on this bullshit. I don’t want to waste more time in pointless obsession. The fixation never leads to satisfaction, only perpetual, unrelenting discontent.
With this constant lower back twinge, I would happily run back to just my hamstring balking. With my achy hamstring, I would have happily regressed to my slowest running pace. Yet when I am healthy and functional, I am never content. That is when I turn on myself the most. Rather than basking in my own functionality and relishing the activities I can participate in, I viciously scrutinize my performance and results.
I made peace with my mind long ago. Most of the time, I do truly accept what my brain is and what that means. Most of the time, I even love it the way I am. It appears I turned all that critique to my flesh, to an impossible moving target that has nothing to do with reality.
I should know this. The lesson here is already one of my life mantras, tattooed on my goddamn arm so I could never forget. What sense could it possible make to make an exception for my body? I have drawn the correlation between the two. I no longer have an ignorant excuse for being so ridiculously foolish and emotionally masochistic.
Now, I have to draw the line and step over to the other side. I should probably start by resting until my back stops sending its cries tearing up my nerves.
Christina Bergling
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