Quarantine Day 13 — The Last Day (this one is a doozy)
I’m leaving this hotel tomorrow, and I’m not sure I am the same person who entered it two weeks ago. The longer I live, the more I realize that the operating system of emotions and beliefs running my life is more important and more powerful than any of my interests and passions, and must be tended to with care. I can love language and linguistics, and I do, I really do. I love how the evolutionary pressures on us as a species have selected for brains that encode meaning in discrete combinatorial units. I love that a baby whose parents only speak a pidgin to it (a language system with limited grammar that usually occurs in areas where two languages are blended) will automatically infuse structure, grammar, and breathe full life into that husk of a language, creating a full-blown creole in one generation. I get goosebumps every time I think about it. I love that we can learn each other’s codes, that our way of being in the world shifts ever so slightly in a different language, that we can access new lenses onto the greater human experience through language learning.
But none of that helps me when I am in pain and scared. When I wake up from a night of high-energy emotions that crashed out of me in tears and stampeded through my nervous system, leaving me a hungover, nonfunctioning shell for an entire day. That was me yesterday. Two nights ago I met with my primary doctor over video. I recounted my new diagnosis my new physical therapist gave me last week (also over video): synovitis. An inflammation of the synovial joint capsule in my knee, likely from pushing through discomfort in my surgical recovery. When my physical therapist diagnosed me, I felt a rush of relief and certainty. Answers! This is a professional who knows what is going on with me and how to help. I can trust him. I am in good hands.
When I met with my doctor, however, suddenly tendrils of doubt and fear started to creep in. Wait, what does this diagnosis mean? Tell me more about it. It’s a known post-operative complication, he explained, the knee can get cranky. My stomach dropped. Thoughts that have been with me for almost two years grew louder. Have I damaged my body forever? Will I ever recover from this? I pressed him to give me a timeline. He hesitated, emphasizing how individual and unpredictable the course of healing can be. Don’t I know it, doc, but give me an answer anyway. 4–6 weeks, he said, if I could avoid triggering it. But I can’t. That’s the rub. I can’t not stand, not walk, not move. He then told me to stop going barefoot altogether, to wear the most cushioned shoes I can get even around my hotel room. I hate this. I’ve been on a foot-strengthening barefoot crusade for the last couple years, and of the six shoes I packed for my move, only one of them is cushioned at all. For the sake of my knee, I told him I’d try it. Will I? That remains to be seen. I am a terrible patient. But, I’ll switch to the cushioned shoes for outdoor walks, definitely. My physical therapist agrees, I am to avoid pain and strain for the next week as best I can. So much for walking around Shanghai and seeing the sights. I will still take walks, but I will have to temper my pace and mileage considerably.
When I got off the call with my doctor, I felt a dark cloud of emotions swirling around me. Sadness, fear, helplessness, anger, misplaced blame at my doctor (“I’ll never see him again! I’ll cancel my membership to that telehealth service! Spoiler: I will, and I didn’t.) I forget when I am in the throes of emotional distress what my best options are. My gut is thrown, it wills me to linger in the feelings, dive deep, feel as bad as I possibly can. I think of calling a friend, shouting at the world on social media, obsessing on it, picking at the wound until it’s much, much worse. There’s a healthier way to process my feelings and I know it, I do it all the time. Somehow, however, I seem to forget about it right when I need it most. It’s going to my structured therapy journal. Naming my feelings, one by one, drawing them out of me and looking at them. A part of me wants my attention, and I can give it to her. I can reconnect with myself and feel seen, feel heard, feel whole again. But I don’t. I call on my friends, looking externally for what I need from within. I get mixed responses. Lots of validation which feels good but, again, isn’t what my hurt part really needs. She needs me. And I’m not there.
My point in all this is that it all comes down to psychology. I can be the greatest interpreter, ESL teacher, linguist, or anything in the world, but if I am acting on my malconditioned trauma responses from the negative beliefs I internalized about myself from the way my caregivers interacted with me and themselves in my early childhood (and, I mean, who doesn’t?), then what does all success matter? If my lens is blurred with the residue of my past and how I’ve shaped myself around it? If I can’t even walk through this world connected to myself, congruent in the truth of my experiences? What’s the point of being good at my job if I am bad at being me?
I keep coming back to this, over and over. In 2019 I worked my ever-living butt off in a type of trauma therapy called EMDR to unpack and reprocess my deepest inner wounds (sounds like a blast, doesn’t it?). I fundamentally upgraded my psychological operating system and it pays dividends to this day. I did for a sweet minute think my psychological work was officially over the day I graduated EMDR, and unfortunately it doesn’t work like that, but I can honestly say my core beliefs about myself are radically, fundamentally different than what they were. Beliefs I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around. I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough. I’m not loveable. I can’t trust my judgement. I went back and unpacked how those beliefs got installed, and I’ll tell you something: once you see the truth, you can’t unsee it. I saw myself, the beautiful, innocent, funny, earnest child that I was, and I loved her. I loved her, and I grieved for her, and I saw that she didn’t do anything wrong to get what happened to her, and I saw that she is me, and I realized I am: good, worthy, loveable, of sound judgement. This was, without question, the most profound experience of my life.
The last few days reminds me of what matters most: our beliefs and our feelings. These are what is running the show. Not our knowledge, not our expertise, not our looks or anything else about us. We don’t act on our knowledge, we act on our beliefs. How many times have I said in therapy “I know what I should feel but I don’t feel that way”? I owe myself a structured journaling session about my knee. Not the journal that is for me but for you, too, in full view, but the journal that will never be published, that I won’t even read again after I write it, because it is not about the words on the page, it is about the process of reaching out to my inner self and saying “yes, hi, I’m here. I hear you. You’re safe with me. I value you. I love you. I’m listening.”
❤
