(Hold Her – For King and Country)
LOL, this post was half-written in probably April-ish and I don’t feel like finishing or editing it…so I’m just going to post it as is
Some days are just hard and maybe there are a lot of big things, but having so many big things makes the little things become additional big things.
For example, I was parked well within the lines of my parking spot, and some lady decides I’m too close to her car and first she just stares at me while I am playing a game of minesweeper on my phone before getting out. Then she approaches and says something like ‘I don’t think I like where you’re parked.’ And I kinda ignore her because none of your business, get in your car and leave me alone…but then she’s repeats it and keeps staring at me, so my non-confrontational self internally screams fine, boss me around however you want while externally smiling and asking where she’d prefer I be and then asking her to get away from the back of my car so I can pull out. I move to the next spot over, and she walks away without even so much as a thank you. And then instead of getting out of the car I am then still sitting there pondering how in the world that happened and why anyone would think they get to dictate to me where I park. Like come on Karen, you don’t own the parking lot. Although can you call someone who isn’t a white lady a Karen? IDK. But the fact that happened 7 hours ago and I’m still coming in hot tells you how skewed my importance meter is after all the big things I had to deal with today.
But there was a major positive today…my exercise therapy program has me assigned to a coach who is supposed to check in with me occasionally to make sure I’m doing okay with things. I talked with her this morning because I was ready to quit because I was tolerating the pain of the program because I thought the prize at the end was lower pain levels…and then a couple weeks ago I talked to a PT who said that pain reduction was not the goal and in fact I should expect the pain to increase. I was already at a point where I have been not infrequently fantasizing about getting my shoulder surgically removed and re-attaching my elbow to just above my hip, so as you can probably imagine the idea of the pain continuing to increase hard to imagine, unbearable, and something that I was pretty sure nothing would be worth. I’m not sure I would even accept higher pain levels than that even to get to keep the positives while erasing my trauma. And that is saying a lot. Should I have asked what the PT’s goal was for me if it wasn’t pain reduction, probably…and should I have told the PT that I was fairly certain I wasn’t interested in any goal that involved my pain levels to continue to rise, also, probably…but that meeting was already spiraling the drain at that point. We all know I have a history of social anxiety that at times has bordered on selective mutism, and I still have to work hard to communicate. If I come to someone with a question and I don’t already have a strong relationship with that person, you can pretty much guarantee that I’ve already tried all the things I can do to solve the problem myself. If it were self-solvable it would already be solved, so telling me it will build my resilience to figure it out myself isn’t helpful. And is a bit hypocritical when you have already stated multiple times that something that technologically only you can do because of your position as the provider you are refusing to do because you don’t know how and aren’t tech savvy aren’t interested in learning. Maybe that sounds overly harsh and critical of me, and like maybe I should have pushed back, but this person also was a lot like talking to an insurance company on the weekend. You try really hard to reach a real person, but you’re definitely going to spend a lot of time listening to menus where you click the choice you hope you want only to hear a pre-programmed paragraph they think will dissuade you from continuing to try to get a real person and then your choices are go back to the main menu or hear that same paragraph again…and you work your way through the options until if you hear another robotic paragraph instead of a connection to a real person the answer for your patient is going to be sorry, but your insurance cannot approve an override today. When you have to do that with a real person, I can imagine it would be exhausting for a non-socially anxious person, but for me that not feeling heard pushes me further away from effective communication skills and I start shutting down. Anyway, that was a very long way of getting to my actual point that my coach skipped over my initial question/comment that I didn’t know what the goal was supposed to be but I was thinking that I didn’t want to tolerate the pain for whatever that goal was, and instead started with talking about progress and that she can’t make guarantees but she really thinks in the next few weeks my pain levels will decrease, and pain reduction is what we’re currently working towards…which meant that my initial I’m quitting became let’s keep trying. And because I felt heard I was able to continue to participate in the conversation and get my questions answered. LOL, maybe we should just call our conversations distract Wiggle Worm from quitting, because I was also about to quit the one other time I talked with her back in like March I think and she started the conversation out with something less related to me being close to quitting and got me to agree to all sorts of things so that by the time we got to the I’m ready to quit I’d already committed myself to too many things to just up and quit…although I did the next day recognize I’d significantly overcommitted and took two weeks off before getting back into it. But yeah, I used my words and they resulted in getting what I needed, so that is a huge success, and I am proud.
So there might have been a lot of hard and scary stuff, but that conversation brought some light to my day.
LOL and that was the end of that half-way written draft…and here is what is on my mind today…
I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis…but…I pay the distracted and inattentive tax often enough that it makes me wonder if the people teasing me about having it in college were right…and maybe my friend who was sure I was her ADHD buddy was right…luckily this time it was a $12 late penalty for not making sure my water bill check got sent…as far as mistakes go, that at least is a pretty cheap one to fix, especially because they didn’t shut off my water so I could just put a check in the mail and it will be fixed as long as I can keep an eye on my account this time to make sur ethe check shows up and gets cashed…I do my best and I can’t expect more of myself than that…and after my nightmare experience in college, there is pretty darn close to zero chance I am ever going to be even miniscule-ly open to pursuing a diagnosis so I’m just gonna keep living with myself the way I am. It isn’t perfect, but humans lived with this for a long time before meds were invented for it, so it is definitely very possible to make it through life…will I always be someone who occasionally finds her keys in the freezer and forgets she’s holding her phone until she no longer knows where it is because she let go in the middle of a parking lot, maybe, but it does at least give me some good laughs once in a while…and I mean, who doesn’t need a little extra humor in their life…lol, this morning before I put on my glasses or contacts I saw a “flake of dust” against the window and I was gonna pick it up to throw it away, but it kept getting away from my fingers before I picked it all the way up…as it turns out, it was actually a fly…or more accurately, a walk. But once it got close enough to my face that I could actually see where it was I picked it up by a leg and brought it to the bathroom to smoosh and throw away…and ten I was trying to make my bed for once and discovered the blanket that looked basically new a week ago has somehow completely disintegrated in the middle into a pile of blanket crumbs…I have no idea how that happens…but I mean, I have been thinking that my linen closet was a little over-full, so there’s one less blanket…although it was my only bed blanket in the correct size…but honestly over the past few years I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t really care if it is supposed to be a bed blanket or a throw blanket if it provides the pressure input and/or warmth I want, whichever is more convenient is what I’m going to use, so I’ve used bed blankets for warmth and throw blankets for the bed…it is what it is as long as guests aren’t coming expecting it to look like a normal room…
And I just looked down and saw the exercise screen waiting for my to hit the next button on the exercise therapy session I started over an hour and a half ago, so I should probably finish that…lol, speaking of exercise therapy, I did eventually find a plan that worked for my body. It is WAY easier, but that has let my body stop the rapid decline that it was going through with the keep trying harder approach the PT’s I’d been working with had been recommending…now I have a PT who will slow me down if I’m trying to do too much and will listen when I recognize things are too hard for me and find a way to meet me where I’m at. Does it feel a little discouraging when it feels like I’m having to take multiple steps backwards to be able to get through exercises that seem like they shouldn’t be that hard, sometimes…but I’m also proud of my stubborn determination to keep trying…
A journey through trauma & triumph 