I'm deciding to be grateful for small victories. This past few days I've only woken up once each night and mostly been able to go back to sleep - at least until around 4 a.m. Who knew that a day would come that I would be excited to sleep UNTIL the alarm goes off! I've decided that I'm just going to be grateful everyday, even if I don't know what for. In the realm of health, I think it's impossible to be grateful for everything until it goes away.
This journey has taught me a lot about that, which is partly why I wanted to write it down. Chronic pain took my lifestyle and now I'm experiencing what it's like to slowly get it back. Some days it feels like I get to open a Christmas present but only one thing every day. First pull the ribbon and wait a day. Then pull another ribbon and wait another day. Break open one piece of tape and then wait a week....
Today I think it's important not to rush things and to let things happen naturally. While I was walking in the woods yesterday, I could experience the physical calm that being healthy may feel like. When you're in pain and/or running in fight/flight/freeze mode physically, you never feel calm in your body. I didn't know that I didn't feel calm in my body all those years - and that there was a difference between physical calm and mental or emotional calm. Of course they are all interdependent, but I would notice if I was upset or mentally tired and not realize that the caffeine/aspertame/sugar habit was really because my body was running on fumes most of the time.
At the same time, I was inwardly motivated to keep going and if I had really realized what was happening....well, I don't actually know the answer to that because the pain was all I could deal with. To get physically calm was impossible. To realize I wasn't able to be physically calm would've been too much.
I decided early on that the car accident was not going to define me - basically that it was not going to win. I simply was not going to stay living that way, was not going to get depressed, and was not going to get addicted to pain pills. I have to admit that being stubborn and overly optimistic helped.
At the same time, it can be overwhelming if you stop moving.
Still now, when the pain returns and becomes too much I end up laying on the couch or in bed just feeling the physical pain. Well, I can tell you that is an impossible life. The couple of years that I slept up to 16 hours in the day have showed me how exhausting chronic pain can be. Life was too overstimulating. Things you used to be interested in aren't interesting anymore because you learn to gauge what is fun by how much pain it's going to cause you. My brain, spirit, heart needed to rest but then you wonder if you're flirting with depression because all you want to do is lay around and sleep.
Mentally, I've had the vision of me "being me" doing "what I do" for years with no evidence that is was ever going to come back. I learned not to tell very many people about it because the hardest thing to deal with some days is other people's definitions of who they think you are - especially when you're working so hard to not succumb to that very definition.
I also stopped seeing myself in the mirror 10 years ago. Of course my body changed and my ability to get stronger was continually thwarted by injury caused by muscle atrophy and the impact of scar tissue, amongst other things.
It's a strange lifestyle. I wish I would have known that it was a lifestyle built for healing. I wish I would've known the difference between a road to depression and what was involved in healing and "fighting the fight". In some ways, it was my road to success and I never knew it. Some days pure instinct drove me to learn how to live.
So now I relearn what it means to be physically calm. It seems my body needs to do this slowly. If I change too much too quickly, the difference in how I feel, what I can do, etc. is too intense and overwhelming. My body will "forget" over time how to live injured and for this miracle I will be forever grateful - even if I forget that that's what I'm actually grateful for.
If someone is reading this with chronic pain, I hope it's helpful for you to hear my story.
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