Thoughts of Limitations

My right shoulder started to pinch after a long drive in May. On the way back from Maine after attending a friend’s wedding and witnessing the birth of my buddy’s restaurant, I noticed I couldn’t hold my right arm out to the steering wheel without sharp pain in my shoulder. And so after some initial goofing around on the internet trying to find some FREE stretch or remedy, I went to the doctor and got a PT script. And after 5 months of physical therapy, the pain dissipated slowly and then all at once. But one night before the shoulder had fully knitted I had the misfortune of sleeping without good neck support and woke to some sharp pain between my shoulder blades, pain that slowly turned into a raw nerve firing down my left arm (for which I’m doing my second round of PT right now). And so it may surprise you—as I sit in specific ways to avoid the tingling pain hitting my pinky—to hear me say that I’ve actually been feeling pretty good in my body recently.

I had the “one day I’ll get abs” notion until a few years ago, when I just accepted that this is what I look like, and actually I’m plenty attractive (though sometimes I feel like I’m actually weird looking and grotesque it’s true), beautiful even. It wasn’t just the, “let’s be real I’ll never do this”, but also wondering what the motivation to transform really was. And besides, no transformation physical or otherwise can happen without a motivation to react to the original state. Something about yourself you deem worthy of redirection.

And what will happen when aspects of the self you moved away from show through the seams? Like many people I didn’t think much of my body at all until it started to hurt. And because some part of my identity had been formed on the idea that people get sick but not me, when things start to go wrong the spell of my self-esteem splinters. The moralizing begins. How could I let this happen? What did I do wrong? Is this just a sign of all the things will go wrong and how old I’ve become. My shoulder hurts because I am sitting wrong, have bad posture, don’t work out or stretch enough. It’s my fault and now I’m paying for it.

If I were a woman I would be dealing with a lot more things in my body than just blocked rotator cuffs, pinched nerves, and achey knees. But in this body I feel myself moving into a new phase, where I am trying not to live in the ill fitting costume of my expectations. How I want to look, how I want to feel, and most importantly, how I want to be perceived. Universal insecurities, all, but ones that perhaps get turned up often in a song of self-sabatoge.

This is why art and writing has felt so good this year, and perhaps why (though it may be perceived as dramatic) a desk job just isn’t an easy fit for me. I really wanted to prove to the audience in my head that I could learn to code. And I did. But it was hard, the coding itself, but moreso to sit at a computer. So hard in fact, I learned that I had ADHD. And learning that about myself, did almost the opposite of proving something to others, it proved to myself that the self criticism came from a place of misunderstanding. Not seeing my limitations clearly. A reactionary voice had become pronounced in my head. One must learn not to see the dirty waters in which we swim, because they sap our will to tread.

And as counterintuitive as an injury (well at least 2) making me feel spry, the failure of my coding career endeavors has made me feel more content in my life. It wasn’t just a fear or an immaturity that kept me from desk jobs (and the promised land of benefits), but a characteristic of how my brain works, and the experience I fed into that brain. There is also a fear that in disliking these companies and corporate jobs I am denying a sort of inevitable truth of the bargain of making a living in a country that is mostly just 5 corporations making decisions for returns on investment. But I can see more clearly now, that fear or not, there are limitations to the paths I can take, sometimes they will feel extremely limiting. But that just makes the questions about the way more focused.

I felt a bit of resentment at first, after my year of dating and job applications. Felt like I compromised for a rug pull. But as I re-align with the new winds, I am feeling a certain peace in acceptance. I feel like I have more energy, more will to endeavor, more excitement for what may come, because I feel reconnected with the narrow column of support that keeps me upright.

I feel that my dedication to PT is one that comes from having a stronger spine (not literally). That even a few years ago Greg would not have committed to his health in such a way. Would have accepted a certain amount of pain and found good reasons for doing so (I can’t afford to keep paying for this. It’s just going to happen again if I stay in the service industry, so really I should just work on getting a non-service job, aka feel bad about not having one).

I was not really taught to have a great attitude about health despite growing up with a nurse. I learned a lot about diseases, and anatomy, which I always loved, about first aid and nutrition but not about having a relationship with a doctor. There was alway a “you’re young you don’t need to worry about that yet” sort of attitude. Doctors are for the flu and ankle sprains. And we just went to the rent-a-doc clinic, where you saw whoever was there on the day. And my takeaway was only, the doctor is boring, and if you can get away with not going to them, then do whatever it takes.

So seeing a PT for 6 months now, doing the exercises every day at home (replacing actual workouts and routines for isolated therapy band muscle movements, sacrificing an hour and $150 (because my insurance is bronze which means, you pay the first $10,000 of coverage then we’ll talk) a week just to knit my shoulder blade back into a position where it sat just a year ago without me doing anything. Well, I think in the past that would have made me angry, and full of self-pity. I will now have to sacrifice things in my life for this. Even if I was able to make the argument that this was good, I would not have believed it emotionally.

And so while my forays into pain in the past have sent me spiraling. Made me furious and sad and ruing some cosmic joker, this year, I seem to have taken a big step in simply understanding my body for what it is. A container for my whole world. Something I should be infinitely grateful for, something I should value not just when I catch my good side in the mirror, but for all the places it takes me and experiences held within it. And I’m showing that gratitude in the best way I know how. By taking better care of it, and doing everything I can to let it heal.