I have been in a bit of a slump this week.
I am really trying to live with the rhythms and cycles of my body, but sometimes I just want to be able to show up the way I WANT to show up, not what I have the capacity for.
About two weeks ago, my family travelled five hours to see Niagara Falls. My eight year old, Ar, discovered this year that they are one of the biggest waterfalls in the world – “Actually, they have the most water flowing over them, mom, but they aren’t the biggest.”, Ar is very particular with getting facts correct. – and we decided to ‘surprise’ him with a trip.
I have been planning the trip for weeks, researching the best, affordable, hotels to stay at and attractions that I thought Ar would enjoy, and could manage with the crowds and noise. I thought I had planned meticulously.
In the end, though, most of the planning was moot as we spent ten minutes at the falls, and played a round of mini golf.
Despite all the best planning, Niagara Falls isn’t sensory friendly. Between the noise, crowds, waiting, and frustration around mini golf skills, Ar was done with attractions within an hour. It didn’t help that it was 33 celsius plus humidity.
We swam a lot at the hotel, though, and Ar declared the trip a success so I am going to take it as a win.
Gosh, do it ever need that win.
While Ar was happy with the trip, and I’m satisfied that he enjoyed a vacation, in all the planning and worrying for Ar, I neglected to plan for my own limitations.
As usual.
I have been home and vegging for over a week and I still feel worn out. I have known for a long time that as my pain level rises and gets out of control, my inner dialogue becomes harder to manage. I fall back into self predatory thinking and things like, “I am worthless.”, “My abilities as a mom are hampered and inadequate because of my pain.”, and, maybe the hardest to still fight after all these years, “I don’t want to live like this” play on repeat, unbidden.
I dissociate from my experience. I isolate myself.
I don’t want to talk about pain, I don’t want to drag others down, and I can’t show up as the person I want to be. I shut down internally because I struggle to reframe distorted thoughts and would rather feel nothing than torture myself with perfectionist expectations that an able bodied person couldn’t meet, let alone me while respecting my capacity, and pain threshold.
Perfectionism with chronic pain is a wild ride.
You can’t do recovery perfectly. I have tried.
You can’t live perfectly while living with chronic pain. I have tried.
You can’t be a perfect human. I have tried.
It’s funny, I worry about failing often, wasting my potential is a lifelong refrain from mentors.
Really though, failure is defined by the individual. Often the sense of failing by society’s standards feels bigger or more meaningful than they would be if we consider our own values. Society’s standards are messed up, and it’s core values definitely don’t align with my own. So why am I holding myself external standards at all? Or judging myself by that metric?
I have been trying for a while to move away from perfectionism, and externally defined values, towards embracing my perfectly imperfect humanity, by building self worth and self compassion. Old thinking patterns creep back in when I am not vigilant, though, and I definitely wouldn’t say I am ‘vigilant’ while in a pain flare. (Or spiral.)
I have a hard time staying emotionally regulated when my pain levels soar. I feel like uncontrolled pain makes me a terrible person. Or not who I want to be anyway. I lose the ability to placate my inner critic, and there’s a dark place I return to where my worth becomes defined by my physical abilities alone. I catalogue all the losses, and gratitude becomes unreachable as anything more than an intellectual concept. I don’t feel it.
When pain is driving, I have little connection to the self I have been striving so hard to uncover. Old scripts about inevitable failure, the unfair nature of life, and being stuck where I am, start playing. I stop doing even the meager amount of self care I usually do.
I know I will dig myself out again.
And again.
Still, every single time I crash I feel it deep in my bones as an issue with my personal strength and see it as failure.
Thanks for sitting with me. 💚