Hurdles In Healing

I've spent how many blog posts waxing on about emotional, spiritual and mental healing? Okay maybe let's not count those. What about other healing though?

You scrape a knee, hangnail or stub a toe? Maybe you do some neosporin and a bandaid? Everyone is different. After my illness last week, boy do I have to heal. And here is where I am with it, which of course has me thinking in all terms of metaphors and other themes.

I'm totally not back to my full self yet. I'm careful with food, coffee, treats and so on because I'm super sensitive to everything with my body right now. I had a really rough workout this morning because I woke up with stomach cramps not knowing if I should go or not. I had to take it easy working out.

I'm not a "take it easy" kind of gal. I constantly push myself. I always want a good challenge so patience with healing is not me. This morning I realized that whatever my body is going through, everything is telling me to SLOW DOWN.

It's almost too funny, the irony of my body literally rejecting going back to life and getting sick the night we returned home. We pretend these things are inconvenient coincidences, but maybe they are legit signs to pay attention to. Did we have such a great vacation, one that ended weirdly with a little bit of a disagreement with my husband and an uneasy ride home that my body completely rebelled against coming back to routines?

You can speculate whatever you want but I'm more attune to the idea that emotionally, mentally and spiritually I have more power over my body than I think. What do personal trainers say? "Mind over matter?" There is truth in the cliches.

We go to therapy to heal mental wounds, but with physical ailments we take medicines and get shots and rarely let our bodies rest. I'll give it to my 6 year old but she was completely right, forcing myself to go back to work that following morning was not a good idea. I needed the rest.

So what are my hurdles in physical healing? They are ironically mostly mental. Now I second guess on what I may have overlooked within my body before my nasty illness overtook my day to day. I'm now wondering what every cramp and moment of discomfort is telling me. Is this a new "normal?' Will my body go back to pre-illness regularity?

We joke that getting older sucks and that what we got away with in our teen and twenties is long gone but it's completely true. I had a better metabolism and very lax caffeine effects compared to now. I can't have iced tea in the evening or it messes with my sleep. I can't drink too much alcohol, which means more than two glasses in one sitting with food, or it can ruin me an entire day. And now, I'm pretty careful about what I'm allowing my tummy to wrestle.

See if I Google it I probably have a tapeworm or something insane. So I sit here hypothesizing and worrying about never getting back to what I thought was normal. Then as I'm trying to figure out what to write about today, I realized I need to embrace whatever my body is telling me and that this may be my new version of normal.

Last night in the homework war, uncharacteristic to my normal self, I used the most calm tone ever talking about the tasks. I refocused her. I didn't yell if she had some crying jag outburst. I just said, okay, "If you need to feel your feelings that's fine, but if you can persist and get through what we need to do, you can spend your evening the way you asked me to earlier. Otherwise those privileges will be lost." It seemed to work much better.

Everything around me, is screaming "SLOW DOWN." Besides my body physically telling me, my anxiety, and things going on in my personal life, I'm just very much yielding to the probability that the new "shake up" in the routine, means taking things so much slower instead of some ridiculous race to get stuff done.

I'm learning to heal all over now. I'm completely in it. We are a couple months away from 2020. All of the motivational things and funny memes are coming out about it's entrance into our calendars. What am I feeling? I think 2019 has been incredible growth. Nothing is perfect and everything in my life is a current work in progress; completely in flux. But I'm not miserable, depressed or overly anxious. I'm making things work. I'm taking things as they come. And that is huge.

Healing may not be linear, which is fact, but I'm just continuing to heal, all over. It is completely encompassing me. There will be many hurdles in healing. There always are. But today, in the midst of the stomach cramps and gurgles, the morning out of routine and the workout that was super difficult on my body and lungs, I just realized "Okay, here I am, healing and working it out one step at a time." I can only do what I can with what I'm dealt. What a revelation! And so I soldier on!