I’ve tended to use essay writing as a positive outlet, with songwriting being a channel for my more negative emotions. For whatever reason, I feel compelled to have my essays conclude with a shiny, hopeful, and optimistic bow. But I’ve seen the world as less rosy over the last few weeks. And instead of writing more honestly, I just didn’t write. So from here on, I’m going to try to write monthly — an interval on which I can sustainably conjure, collect, and organize positivity.
Of course, I am aware of how lucky I am to be writing at all. To be able to walk. To be climbing again, albeit exclusively at the gym. I need to remind myself of my good fortune several times a day. But I’m here to report that taking a big ground fall isn’t as fun as it looks on social media. And, if only for a few moments, I hope to be able to convey a fuller range of emotions and difficulties stemming from my fall.
Each day is framed by several hundred reps of physical therapy, which, based on the simplicity of the exercises, I’m embarrassed to say leaves me quite exhausted. And in the process of doing PT, I seem to have strained a tendon in my right knee, making walking more difficult. The knee will unexpectedly buckle in pain when I’m simply standing still. The number of steps I can take each day is extremely limited. One day, I got confident and walked about 1/16 of a mile uphill on a sidewalk, then back down… I didn’t recover for over a week.
Meanwhile, my right elbow and bicep still have shooting pains with simple daily motions. The arm worries me more than anything, because it needs to withstand so much stress while rock climbing. So after 5 months of rest, healing, recovery, and setbacks, it’s still hard to predict what my future with the sport looks like.
And while there are obvious physical impacts from sitting in bed for 3 months, I believe the bodily stress of my accident is also changing my appearance. When I look in the mirror, I suddenly see a lot more grey hair — not just a bit at the temples, but all over my head.
So my body doesn’t feel or look quite like me. But the mental impacts have been more frustrating.
As I wrote in my week 16 post, I’ve been trying to reduce my gabapentin dosage. Last week, I also went cold-turkey with the sleeping drugs that I’ve been on since my hospital stay. The combined effect has left me more irritable and more depressed than at any point since my accident. I’ve been trying to boost my mood with caffeine, but the effect wears off at night. I might request an SSRI from my doctor, but a new prescription med to help get off of prescription meds seems a bit like Springfield’s plan to eradicate Bolivian tree lizards.
This week, as I was driving down the street, I heard my inner dialogue return for about 20 minutes. I had loud thoughts! They bounced around in my head! Even more fascinating, I made connections to those thoughts and things happening in the outside world! As the moment passed, I realized that this was how living in my head used to feel all of the time.
At least I think that’s what used to happen up there. I remember feeling sharper. I always had a song in my head. I recall feeling more energized. I think I was happier.
But it’s hard to say for sure. I wouldn’t have realized it if it wasn’t for that 20 minutes of lucidity, when the veil was briefly lifted. With my prescription-drug mask ever-so-slightly pulled back, I caught a glimpse of how life used to look.
In my week 10 essay, I discuss how easy it is to normalize to each life accomplishment — to forget what it was like when our skills weren’t honed or our existence wasn’t so cushy. It turns out that it’s also easy to normalize to how quickly our synapses fire. Or how much pain we have in our bodies. How we engage with the outside world. How we appear in the mirror. How often we smile.
It’s easy to forget who we are.
Sadly, this is pretty common. We forget what it can feel like to sleep well. Or who we are without seven things to do at once. We wear our stresses like a mask. With time, this mask binds with our skin. We fail to perceive any shift, and ultimately, forget that there was ever a mask at all.
Two years post covid, we are all experiencing this on some level. We’ve slowed or altered our personal interactions. Most of us have changed the way we work. We connect differently with our families. As the pandemic (hopefully) wanes, some features of the last two years will become permanent fixtures in our lives.
We might blindly fall into our new skin, but I hope that we can be cognizant enough to decide which layers to shed and which to keep. And as we pull back our literal and figurative masks, I hope that we can first remember, and subsequently recover, what we loved about who we once were.