The Only Way Out is Through

Project 365, Day 101/365

I’ve been thinking a lot about healing lately. Physical healing, yes, but also all the other kinds of important healing like spiritual and emotional. Even the physical healing that’s far deeper than the surface. And mostly, that I’m starting to understand how deeply they’re all related. Without getting too far into details, I’ve come to a place where I had to chose to keep searching for “problems” or I had to chose to trust in the process, however difficult it is for me. I’ve written about something similar before, so this might be repetitive, but sometimes—most times—you need to say something to yourself over and over and over and over again before it sticks. And you know what? This might not be the last time for me, either.

Not to get into all the boring details, but Monday, I showed up for physical therapy in quite an emotional state. My PT always approaches me the same way: me warming up on the treadmill, him walking over with a smile in his eyes (you know…masks), and says “How are we doing, friend? What’s the report since the last time you were here?”

I tend to give him the play-by-play of my days. What I felt. If anything weird came up or I had any new pains and ailments, or even, just maybe, that I felt good. But that day, I didn’t have it in me to fake anything or even go through the motions. “I’m not sure you want me to answer that,” I said back to him. “If I do, this might turn into a therapy session.” He pulled me off the treadmill and we talked. I told him how I’d been feeling badly again, how I was so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. How it always felt like something new…when was I going to feel good again? A few days before that, sitting right here where I am, I broke down to Charles. “I’m so tired,” I said to him, after a stretch of time talking about what I was feeling, him asking questions, trying to not let me fall into the pit of despair that used to be my companion late last year. I don’t remember all of what I said to him, but really, it all boiled down to one simple thing: I’m so tired.

So I went into that with my PT, and by the end, he asked me: “What do you most need from me today?” I didn’t know, he said it was okay that I didn’t know, and he suggested we run through some tests. Tests I had done when I first walked in to see him three months ago. He wanted to prove to me how much had changed in that time, how much stronger I was, how things have improved, even if I wasn’t giving that improvement the stock it deserved. And in the process, he worked with me to reassure me that no, I wasn’t moving backward, and helped me mentally log certain things I would go over with my internist the next day, as I had an appointment.

My visit with my doctor went about the same as it did with my PT: I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. We talked a lot, about what I was feeling, the roads we had already gone down together, what more we could go down. He told me he was there for me, that we’d figure this all out together, and equipped me with more things to do for myself. He also ordered more tests…looking for some scary things. I held my breath until I got back in the results, and thankfully, it all was fine. Then, I saw my old chiropractor and walked him through what I had been living through the past seven or eight months since I last visited his office, and he said something to me that echoed an email from a reader (I mentioned it earlier this week): when you feel like you’ve hit a wall, sometimes, you need to just stop looking for “answers”, step back and see what is in your control.

For me, that meant trusting the people I’m working with, trusting what they’re saying to me, trusting the regiment they have me on, and trusting that they know a little bit more about some things than I do. Now, that said, I’m a BIG believer in advocating hard for yourself, and if your gut is telling you that something is not right, that someone is not listening, that there are answers, don’t ever stop. But right now, for me, I’m not sure I feel that. In all these months, the one thing I haven’t tried is just sitting still…mentally. Letting myself feel what I feel, and talking back to it. Maybe even welcome it, so I can try to better understand it, and in turn, find real healing.

This might be the hardest part of all of this: letting go of control, but as they say, the only way out is through. I need to grab hands with my suffering, let it know it’s safe with me, and walk us both through the tunnel. No flashlight. No snacks (man, I love snacks). No bathroom breaks. Just through.

I’ve been living in so much fear of my body, aware of every minute detail of discomfort or weird something or other, afraid of it, fighting it because I didn’t understand it, but the past few days, I’ve started sitting with it a bit, letting myself feel whatever it is I’m feeling and training my brain to push the fear aside. I’m safe. I’m home. I’m okay. And I started to find, rather quickly I might add, that as soon as I didn’t let my first reaction be fear, it was much easier to coexist with my symptoms. And then from there, if I got really good at the coexisting, I’d stop and realize, a little while later, wait…this isn’t bothering me as much anymore.

My mind and the power it has to help me through, to the other side of healing, is maybe the most powerful elixir I haven’t been using enough through all of this. In fact, I’ve been using it against me, like a Chinese finger trap. Remember those? You’d put one finger into each end of the woven tube, and your first instinct to get out of it was to pull with all your might. Except, the more you struggled, the more you fought it, the tighter and harder it held on to you. The trick? Pushing into the finger trap to relax the material enough to give you some slack and let you out of it. The only way out is through.

I have felt a lot of peace the last few days since I really came to this realization for myself and I have to say, peace is a good feeling. Peace doesn’t mean the absence of pain or discomfort, of course, but to me, it levels the playing field. It makes my problems no bigger than I am, and in fact, tends to make them a bit smaller.

This whole self-therapy session is really just to encourage any of you out there, whatever it is, that if you’ve tried everything with regards to something you’re dealing with if you’re hitting a wall, if the weight that your carrying is too heavy a burden, put it down. Don’t pull away from the finger trap, but push into it. Trust the process. Find a way to tell the fear that is controlling your moves to kick the bucket and leave you be. It’s a lying sack of garbage. Nothing is easier or better when you let fear tag along, is it? No. Hard things are made harder because of it, but it has somehow convinced us that we need it, that it’ll save us from ourselves when really, it’s drowning us. In ailments. In anxiety. In physical pain. In intangible pain.

Trust the process. Trust the people you half-heartedly put your trust in…except fully this time. Or find new people you whole-heartedly trust to walk alongside you. Trust yourself. Sit in the stillness that’s left when you take fear and doubt out of the equation. You just may find your healing there.

See you tomorrow, friends.