Torn in Two – Part 11

The Chronic Pain Series

For anyone wondering how much longer this series is going to drag on, I can assure you we’re on the home stretch. I can also say, with absolute certainty, that it has meant so much to receive all your lovely comments and DMs – you really know how to make a guy pretending to be a platypus feel special. Thank you.

Talking about the things that upset me in therapy and journaling about them at home were both important parts of my healing, but after that first crying session, I realised that allowing my body to engage in a physical act of relinquishing all the things that upset me was just as important. From then on, allowing myself to uncontrollably shake and scream and cry on the floor of my room in child’s pose became my embodied way of expelling the repressed emotions that’d gotten trapped in my body.

As cheesy as it may sound, I came to think of therapy, journaling, and crying-my-eyes-out-in-child’s-pose as my ‘cathartic trinity’. They were how I exorcised my demons. I’d go to therapy every Wednesday afternoon and talk through a bunch of uncomfortable shit – unearthing what lurked in my psyche. Then I’d go home and journal about the revelations I’d made in therapy – lightening the load on my mind by banishing whatever I’d unearthed to paper. And once the sadness and the radiating pain became too much to handle, I’d get on the floor in child’s pose and heave and sob – physically abolishing whatever evils had latched onto my body.

Putting myself through these three practices every Wednesday was emotionally and physically exhausting. And yet, it was also liberating. Much like vomiting, by the end of each week’s crying session, I always felt a bit better. I felt better mentally, physically, and emotionally. Sifting through all the stuff I’d buried was not only helping my back, it was also improving my overall way of being. Unhelpful stories I’d been telling myself were being identified. Why and how I’d fallen into addiction was becoming clearer. And an air of acceptance was beginning to surround the things I couldn’t change – the speed of my recovery being one of them.

While all this was going on I continued to do Yin-yoga twice a week. And I carried on doing the physio exercises every day. Everything seemed to be helping, so I stopped seeking alternative opinions and extra treatments. I let go of trying to ‘dissect’ and ‘solve’ my back pain. And I stopped pining for things to go back to the way they were. Somehow, I started to realise that working through this ordeal was helping me change the direction of my life. It was giving me what I didn’t know I needed.

One of the hardest things about breaking free of addiction is that once you escape the pull of that lifestyle – you find yourself in a limbo state. You don’t just magically walk into a new life. You must forge it. Day by day, moment by moment. And when your life has revolved around getting off your face that means you quite literally have to learn how to live in a new way. Giving so much of my time and effort to overcoming this injury was helping me carve that new path. It gave me something to focus on during a precarious period in my sobriety journey. I was transitioning out of a life where drugs and alcohol filled my days, and if it wasn’t for the physio exercises, the yin-yoga, the journaling, and the therapy – I don’t know how I would’ve filled all that extra time. Working to overcome this injury gave me a new routine. And not just any routine – a positive one. One where, ‘good begets good’. I mean, why would I put toxins into a body I was trying to heal? Why would I bombard my mind with anxiety-inducing chemicals when I was working so diligently to free my mind of all that stuff? The positive routine I’d adopted to help me heal had inadvertently made my resolve to abstain from drugs and alcohol even stronger. And not only was it helping me stay sober – it was showing me what a sober life could actually look like.

To me, measuring time has always seemed like a slippery thing. Sure, we’ve devised a system of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years etc., all of which are supposedly pinned to the revolutions of the earth – but if we’re honest, the math is kind of off. That’s what a leap year is, right? An unwanted reminder that our measure of time is a little messy. I like this messiness. After all, I have no idea how much time passed between when I received the MRI results that led me to change my physio exercises and when the physio suggested I should go for a skate. Maybe it was two months, maybe three, maybe four – who knows. Thanks to this messiness, I don’t think it matters. What matters is that I didn’t listen to my intuition when my physio suggested I go skate. I didn’t feel ready to get back on my board. But the physio assured me I’d made real progress with the exercises, and I felt like I’d made real progress with everything else, so what did my intuition know? Besides, maybe I was ready, and I was just scared.

I wasn’t ready.

Or, at least, my back wasn’t. As no less than two minutes into rolling around on the flat ground outside my apartment – my back spasmed, again. I was distraught.

Much like the previous times my back had spasmed, this latest one threw everything into question and brought on its own wave of despair. I thought I knew which movements aggravated my back. I thought I had regained a lot of strength and flexibility through physio and yoga. And I thought all the therapy, journaling, and crying was really helping. And yet, there I was, more than 16 or 17 months into this ordeal, in the exact same position as when I started.

That’s how I thought about things the day of the spasm anyway. But much quicker than normal, I realised I was catastrophising, leaping to conclusions, and ignoring all the progress I’d made. In other words, I caught myself slipping into old thought patterns. Employing the techniques my therapist had taught me I steadied my mind. Utilising what I’d learnt about my back muscles I did things that alleviated the tightness and the pain much quicker than before. But by far the biggest change was that I didn’t bottle-up my frustration about this latest spasm. Instead, I journaled about it, and I talked to my therapist about it.

During the next few therapy sessions, I talked to my therapist about my fear of never getting back on my skateboard and about how important skateboarding was to me. Talking to my therapist helped me realise I’d put skating on a pedestal. Over the years I’d given so much to skateboarding, that I’d lost myself in it. My identity had become so tightly wrapped up in riding that plank of wood, that I’d inverted things. I’d come to see skateboarding as my source of happiness and contentment. Forgetting that skateboarding was simply the medium through which I expressed the happiness and contentment already within me. Somehow, I’d fallen into the trap of handing my peace of mind over to an external thing, instead of remembering that something so sacred can only be found internally.

Putting that together was significant. Not just in reframing the way I met skateboarding, but also in protecting me from making the same mistake with my new obsession: writing. I realised I couldn’t rely on skating or writing, or anything outside of myself, to make me feel whole. I couldn’t let my ability to skate or my success in writing dictate how I felt inside. This didn’t mean I had to stop doing them. Or that I couldn’t still enjoy them. Or that I couldn’t still try really hard when I did them. It just meant I had to stop worshipping false idols. It was time to face the abyss of existence without a crutch.

To be continued. . .

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