A Whack Upside the Head
Recalibrating My Frantic Existence
(I wrote the bones of this a few years ago but have since revisited and polished it. A nod to those who are currently navigating unexpected illness or recovery.)
Two messages were abundantly clear:
Slow. The. Fuck. Down. (and)
You cannot control this at all, so stop trying.
Period.
Two messages that I do not receive well, messages that have repeatedly tried to find their way into my evolutionary process, but I guess I didn’t get the memo, or at least I didn’t listen. I needed a more direct whack upside the head.
A good friend asked me, “Did you get the sense knocked out of you or into you?”
I contemplated for a moment and then admitted, “A little of both, I think, but mostly, I got the sense knocked into me.”
Because when all you can do is lie in bed for hours, days, and weeks, contemplation is all that is left. You can command me not to use my brain, and I will try; I am superb at following directions, but my thoughts are a runaway train, they always have been, and that train has sped me down a steep descent into, well, my own chaotic self.
The ER doctor’s instructions were to rest for forty-eight to seventy-two hours as much as possible (side note: don’t ever say as much as possible to a mom because I promise you, I’m going to find a billion loopholes. Best to just skip straight to scaring the living daylights out of me.) I mistakenly assumed that after that time, I would be back to normal. By day three, I was already losing my mind. Usually, when you have an injury and you are ordered to bed, you do everything you can to keep your mind stimulated while your body heals. People visit, you talk, read books, watch shows, knit, or write. But when it’s your brain that needs to heal, and your body’s okay, well, what’s the playbook?
How I ended up in the ER that day was so unglamorous that I barely want to admit it. It’s not like I was in a car accident, or was injured playing a sport or saving someone from an oncoming disaster. I was simply rushing around the house in my usual fashion, my to-do list scrolling through my brain on repeat, when I noticed that our new puppy, Winnie, had something in her mouth that probably wasn’t supposed to be in there and (she’d taken to snarfing down scrunchies and then vomiting them back up two days later), I stuck my fingers in between her teeth and removed a twist tie.
Keeping her attention with excited exclamations, I spun around and bent down at the same time to pick up a ball for her to stick in her mouth instead. See, twist tie bad, ball good! I was rudely interrupted mid-spin by a powerful smack and pain that reverberated through my skull as my head slammed into the bar. I instinctively pressed my hand against the spot over my right eye and sank to the floor, a steady stream of profanity rolling off my tongue. Breathing deeply and measuredly, eyes pressed tightly closed, I silently scolded myself; that was stupid, that was so stupid. How did I manage that?
“Are you okay, Mom?” My son moved toward me. When I didn’t immediately reply, he repeated, “Mom, are you okay?”
I shooed Winnie, who was trying to lick my face and doing that full-body wag that says, I sorry, really, so sorry. I love you, see, (wag-wag-lick-lick), see how sorry I am? I squeezed my eyes tighter.
“Yes, I’m fine; it’s okay, Sweetie. It just hurts.” Tears came and went while I continued with deliberate breaths, waiting for the pain and the shock to pass. I was still crumpled on the floor.
“Mom, are you okay? Can you get up?” It was my son again, a twinge of uncertain worry on the edges of his words.
I’m scaring him, I thought; I need to get up.
“Yes,” I assured him (and myself), “I can get up, I will, I’m fine, I promise, I’m fine.” I tried a lighthearted chuckle.
I opened my eyes and then stood slowly and carefully and released my palm from my forehead. Okay, yeah, I’m fine, just bumped my head, I thought. I’ve done that plenty of times before, and I’ve always been fine. Probably going to have a nasty bruise, though. I assumed a giant ‘egg’ was beginning to form under my skin, but in the back of my mind, there was a faint whisper, you’re going to have a goddamn concussion.
Nah, I reassured myself, people bump their heads all the time; I’ve bumped my head a lot over the years and never had anything more than a lump. I found my way back to whatever item I’d been checking off the list when I first noticed Winnie, completed it, and then climbed the stairs to my office and sat down at the computer to catch up on bills and emails. As I clicked through the messages, answering, deleting, and reading, I noticed that I felt odd.
I couldn’t instantly describe what felt off, but it was enough for me to stop and wonder. I brushed it off insistently; nah, don’t be silly, you don’t even have a bruise. (I had checked in the mirror, and there was nothing more than a slight mark above my right eye). I ignored the feeling and powered through for about forty minutes. Then the feeling was undeniable. I began to shiver, chilled even though the room was warm. I noticed a sensation of floating and a groggy, heavy, disorientated feeling, similar to having taken Benadryl.
Still, I resisted; there’s no way, I insisted dismissively to myself; I don’t have a concussion, and besides, I’ve never heard of chills being one of the symptoms of concussion. I googled it quickly just to confirm. I was right; there was nothing in the list of symptoms about chills or shivering.
But damn! I was tired, so tired, sleepy, drugged.
Fine! I continued my internal dialogue, not even stopping to think that the ongoing conversation I was having with myself was probably a red flag all on its own. Fine, I’ll call my doctor just to rule it out, but even as I dialed the number and waited for the nurse to come on the line, I felt ridiculous, like I was overreacting and doing that overly cautious thing that I tend to catch a lot of flak for.
A minute later, the nurse corroborated, “It sounds like you’ve definitely got a serious concussion. You need to get someone to drive you to the ER.”
“But I don’t have any of the common symptoms,” I protested. “I didn’t black out, I’m not dizzy, I’m not nauseous or vomiting, besides chills and this weird, drugged feeling, I’m fine.”
“You need to go get checked out,” she repeated firmly.
“Okay,” I acquiesced.
But even as I waited for hours in the ER for the doctor to see me and order a CT scan, I doubted the decision. A couple of times, I turned to my mom and said, “We should just leave; this is silly. I’m sure I’m fine — what a waste of time and money.” But I was already there, so I stayed, and I’m glad I did.
Those first days and weeks in bed found me submerged in a swamp of disbelief, doubt, and an intense helping of guilt. And since there was literally nothing else I was allowed to do besides think, I sank deep into those feelings and tried desperately to understand them. I didn’t give myself a concussion, just like I didn’t give myself RA, but somehow, there was a heavy responsibility that lingered, and as always, logic and emotions went to war in the pathways of the brain I was supposed to be resting. Questions bubbled up, and I tried to answer them honestly because what did I have to lose?
One of the first questions that persisted as I lay in bed, the fog settled in and not showing any sign of lifting, was — how the hell did this happen? I replayed the moment over and again, not only seeing the seconds in slow motion, but feeling them too, the ones leading up to and immediately following my crash into the bar. It wasn’t like I was trying to find a place to lay blame, or perhaps I was, but I knew it was an accident, and as they say, accidents happen.
I was acutely aware of the frenzied nature in which I go about much of my life. It would take too long and be too utterly tedious to explore the roots of the state of emergency energy bubble that has carried me through my life. I’ve noticed it periodically, the tension, the constant need to be ready for anything at any point, the contingency plans, the back-up to the back-up, the hours of what-ifs and worst-case scenarios that tumble through my brain when I’m trying to rest, I’ve noticed it and brushed it off — it’s just who I am. But maybe, it’s not sustainable.
Which is a natural segue into the next question I found myself dismantling — why so much guilt? I’ve described those foggy hundreds of hours as a swamp, and as such, guilt was the thick mud, the sucking mud, the kind that you must leave your boots behind to get out of.
About ten days in, I was exasperated. I made a phone appointment with my doctor and pleaded desperately, “What am I doing wrong? It’s been way more than seventy-two hours.”
“I’m going to guess that you’re probably doing too much.”
“But I’m not, I swear. Just some laundry, helping with meals a bit, there were a couple of bills I absolutely had to pay.”
“That’s too much. You need to be resting.”
“I am resting — mostly.”
“Look, I know you’re a mom, I understand what that means, but if you don’t take this seriously, it may take years for you to recover.”
That got my attention — as I said before, best to just get straight to scaring the living daylights out of me.
I sighed.
“Okay, tell me exactly what I can do, and I will do only that.”
“Nothing. We’re coming up on the weekend. For the next three days, I’m ordering complete body and brain rest until your symptoms are gone.”
“Can I at least get my own meals?”
“If you need to, but if one of your kids or your husband can bring them to you in bed, they should. You have to take care of yourself; you have to let them take care of you.”
Damn.
Take care of yourself. We know those words; we say them to each other all the time, usually in parting, as a matter of habit. But what does it look like to actually take care of ourselves? How committed are we to taking care when it seems to leave others high and dry? What about when it leaves the people we love and care about without that love and care?
As I lay in bed that weekend, consumed by guilt, and shame too, cringing every time the kids climbed the stairs with a drink or a meal, kicking myself for doing too much at first, even though I didn’t know I was doing too much nor how badly it could affect the outcome, I finally stopped and thought, this is insane. I have an injury, and even though it’s invisible, it is the same as if I had broken a limb. Why, when I know that, can I not shake this feeling that I somehow am responsible for the injury in the first place (rushing around like a maniac) or at fault for not being better yet?
It occurred to me that I had a well-formed expectation of what an acceptable recovery looked like. A few days, mostly in bed, maybe even a week, that was okay; in fact, I knew I could use the rest. But after that, it was luxurious, it was overindulgent, and I had to admit to myself that, especially with an invisible injury, I was worried people would begin to doubt that I was still not well. Having navigated the past fourteen years with a largely invisible disease, I know that I am prone to a certain paranoia about people around me doubting my pain because I seem fine.
But the headache, the floating head feeling, the extreme exhaustion, the nausea that plagued me any time I tried to read or even to write a check, the idea that if I didn’t double down and follow my doctor’s orders, I may be living with those for years, was enough for me to dive into that guilt and try to free myself.
Expectations are a part of being human, and in our society, our value is measured by what we produce. It may not be fair or right, but it is true. If you’re not stretched too thin, barely hanging on, wishing there were more hours in the day, then you’re not doing it right; you’re not doing enough. I’ve run up against those ideas before, especially when my kids were little.
I remember this unspoken assumption that a successful mom doesn’t have time. If you weren’t running around like a chicken without a head, then you must be letting something, or many things, fall through the cracks. I can’t say I ever fully bought into the idea, but not buying into it did make me feel as if I was lacking somehow. I would hear other moms divulging, or more like bragging, about how they barely had time to brush their teeth, forget about washing their hair, and yes, this was yesterday’s tee-shirt! I would chuckle uneasily and nod my head in agreement, but what I was thinking was, I do wash my hair and brush my teeth and put on clean clothes — what am I doing wrong? I’m not frazzled enough, which means I’m not doing enough — shit! Those moms seemed to wear the chaos as a badge of honor, I could tell it gave them purpose and meaning; I decided that I must be selfish somehow.
I understand that my experience is subjective, and my lens is very personal, but the message that has filtered through to me over the years, especially since I became a mother is real. In this society that was built by and on Puritanical ideals, laziness is abhorrent, and the pressure to produce and contribute is immense. Our value is attached to what we produce and how we contribute to the household, the family, the community, and finally, the world at large. We learn about our value as soon as we can comprehend — anything. And if you are ill or injured, the message is usually stop feeling sorry for yourself, buck up — power through, which is what I’ve been doing, as most people do, all my life.
And now my doctor was telling me, “If you try to power through this, you won’t heal.”
More than two weeks in, not much had changed. There are no exercises to do or medications to take to speed up the process. “The better you are at resting, the sooner you’ll recover,” my doctor assured me. I was following the rules religiously while still thinking, I’m not sure I can do this for months. And although I was doing as I’d been told, to get better faster, it didn’t seem to be working. When I felt symptom-free, I would move around cautiously and do a few things, but as soon as that woozy feeling flooded back, I would climb into bed and sink anew into the runaway train of my thoughts.
It’s common for me, having grown up in a religious household, to fall into the trap of the reason — why did this thing happen? And while I do think that many of the things that happen to us offer us the opportunity to learn, I also know that most of the time, things just happen.
With God, there is always a reason, even though you never get to know what it is; just like with God, there is punishment for things you don’t know you did, which, by extension, encourages the punishing of the self. It is a clinging belief, as those learned in our formative years often are, nearly impossible to shake because it is as automatic as breathing. I learned to perceive illness as a punishment for something I’d done or, alternatively, as a test of some sort. I found myself wondering what kind of terrible person I must have been in a past life and/or what lesson I was failing to learn in this one. I chided myself but still couldn’t shake it. I know it stems from a need to have some sort of explanation for suffering because why would it just be?
How is it that bad things just happen without rhyme or reason? That means that the world really is simply chaos, and we are at the mercy of that chaos. Even though my adult brain understands the absurd and irrational nature of chasing a reason, my child brain, my formative brain, is still mired in those limiting beliefs.
And so, I lay there, tangled deep into what am I supposed to learn? I recorded my journey on a voice recorder app since I couldn’t write by hand or type on a computer:
I don’t yet feel like I’m able to embrace whatever lesson is buried here. All I feel today is resignation and defeat and a complete sense of powerlessness.
I also felt fear; it had come and gone time and again over the preceding weeks; what if I never get better? My body was already struggling before this injury, but I had my brain, my words — my ability to connect with the world through my words; if I lose that… And I lay there and wept silently, alone in my bedroom, the afternoon sun beating down on me through the windows. What if all I am to my family for the rest of my life is a burden?
And since I had spent so much time sinking in and trying to understand the soup of feelings over the previous days, I decided to sink into that one, too, and it’s a big one — fear.
I turned on some flute music (my favorite for brain relaxation, it always whooshes me straight to a desert landscape where I feel most connected with all things), closed my eyes, and settled into the bottomless recesses of my brain.
I found myself in a deep, dark, damp pit, like an old well, with only a thin shaft of light shining down from the opening. In that hole, chained to the wall, were faces, lots of faces, gazing at me calmly. It dawned on me abruptly that they were the faces of my fears because what better thing to do with your fears than to lock them away where they can have no power over you? I glanced up at the weak shaft of light and then back at the faces. They were not at all frightening. One of them looked directly at me and smiled purposefully, “You know, it doesn’t have to be dark in here; you have the power to let in the light.”
I have the power to let in the light.
I glanced up at the opening to the pit, with the intention of moving the lid aside just a bit, but in an instant, it seemed, the pit was gone; I was squinting against the full sunlight, my fears right there with me, chains disintegrated. And I thought, okay then, now what?
And I know it might sound crazy to say that my fears continued to speak, but they did. “We aren’t meant to be overcome or conquered; we must be embraced. We don’t detract from the whole; we are just as much a part of you as your hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Give us a seat at the table; hear what we have to say. Have a chat with fear — discover its purpose. As a part of the moving whole, we must have a say, or the whole cannot function as a complete entity.”
WTF?
I sat bolt upright, paused the music, and then blinked profusely, trying to reorient my senses. I noted the sound of the wind whistling in through the screen and drank in the reds, oranges, and yellows that adorned the tree line, desperate to redeposit myself in the now. Once I did so, I allowed my thoughts to return to the message I’d just received from my subconscious. My fears don’t diminish me or make me less than; they just are. And they’re strong, and they’re powerful, and it is a strength and a power that I can use. They can guide me.
I imagined my fears lined up outside my office door like so many applicants waiting for an interview. Damn, I thought, this could take a while. A lifetime, to be exact, and I have, by no means, had a chat with each of my fears, but I feel an enormous weight has been lifted simply knowing that I don’t have to fight against them because in fighting against them, I was simply fighting myself and that’s futile.
At four weeks in, I still felt dizzy, or rather, like my head wasn’t quite attached to my body. When someone asked how I was, there was a twinge of guilt that clung to my answer, a sense of unfairness to them when I would say, “I’m still not back yet.” I wandered around the house, holding onto things, swaying now and then, cursing when alone; this is ridiculous! Can I really be expected to lumber along at a quarter capacity for this long without completely losing my mind, my whole sense of purpose?
The days and weeks blended so that by the time week seven rolled around, I was living a new normal. For a brief moment, on a cloudy, cold, and rainy day, I felt that flush of eagerness, the urge of inspiration, and I longed to jump up out of bed and settle down at my desk and write, but I could not. I allowed myself to wonder what my life would be like if I could operate at full strength. That well-polished ideal flickering in my mind’s eye, the one that is strong and lean and eternally youthful, an impossible ideal but one that permeates every crack and corner of our culture nonetheless.
I instantly regretted it as my mind took flight with all of the possibilities, all that I could do and be…if only.
It never pays to dwell on if only because it is a fantasy. I’ve lived many moments behind the bars of if only, which naturally gives way to a laser focus on the future, the future where somehow things will be better or more complete. It is another echo from my formative years. Religion is all about the future. Someday, in heaven, everything will be better. The truth of that particular moment was that the future was going to suck if I didn’t spend the time that my body was demanding of me, sinking into the now and only the now.
Healing takes time, whether it is the body, the mind, or the heart. How often do we give ourselves the time to really heal? It is not going to be easy for me to learn to stop projecting myself into the many iterations of the future. I’ve done it since I was tiny. It’s not going to be easy to stop with the what-ifs and the contingency plans. It’s not going to be easy to resist the weight of Puritanical guilt that was laid purposefully on my shoulders day after day throughout my childhood and into my young adult and mothering years. But I am determined to remember all that I have learned over the course of my recovery. I could keep barreling down the rabbit hole of my consciousness, but I’d rather just pause and mingle with the things that have bubbled up.
I’ve learned that it is possible to prioritize my wants and needs without diminishing my role in my family structure. I’ve learned that my family is a good deal more capable than I give them credit for and, for the most part, doesn’t need the extensive hand-holding I’ve so long felt obligated to give. I had put so much pressure on myself, eagerly swallowing myths and ideals about what it meant to be a good mom, building the confinement that had bound me up so tight, that when I spun around and hit the bar, I might as well have been a spring, so tightly wound and compressed that it had to bust out of the space where it was held. I had stood next to those myths, and I never measured up. Always racing toward some future where someday I would achieve the myth and the lamenting the past where I fell woefully short. The past is the past; the future is a figment, and there is no way to be in either of those places.
I’ve talked the talk about being present, living in the moment, intention, and consciousness, but I’ve never really lived it. This experience forced me to. And while I’m sure I’ll forget how and will get caught up again in the myths, I hope I can steer my energy towards busting them or dismantling them rather than attaining them. My daily to-do list is still long. I know it’s going to take practice to let some of it go. And it will be a painful process at times. Because if there’s anything I love more than an expertly contrived list, it is the satisfaction of crossing off each and everything on it. That frenzied, frantic way of living simply cannot suit me anymore. I must find another way, a gentler, more grounded way.
And perhaps, something for future pondering: why did I need a nurse’s or doctor’s permission to go to the ER? I knew something was wrong. I had an immediate instinct that I had a concussion. However, for all the lip service I pay to trusting my intuition and following my instincts — I didn’t, I couldn’t.
An unraveling thread for another time, but hopefully not another injury.
