How often do you feel powerless?
As patients, we often feel like we are at the mercy of fate or a higher power or our own bodies. There’s not a lot we can do about it when our bodies break. Even when it’s gradual, there are ways to address symptoms sometimes, and perhaps halt the decline but, at least for most of mine, I have had to sit back and feel it happen until the damage is done, and my body settles.
It’s not a topic I am fond of examining. If I avoid talking about it, I can pretend that living in my body doesn’t make me feel powerless.
But sometimes it works in our favor. I once dealt with a situation where I was cut off from some people I love, through no fault of mine or theirs. They were told that they weren’t allowed to contact me. It was devastating. For the first time, I had to set boundaries and deal with the fact that people I had let in had hurt me deliberately.
I felt powerless. It made me so angry, but to move forward, I had to simultaneously express, and thereby validate, my own feelings, and suck it up to deal with exacerbating factors. I didn’t want to, but I wanted to see my loved ones more than I wanted to stick to my guns.
It’s been ages since it happened and it’s still a hot button for me.
Then I talked to one of my doctors about it. (This falls under the sharing of stressful things that could affect chronic conditions.) He pointed out that the minute I was cut off from my loved ones, comfortable, accessible me suddenly became a Mystery. And isn’t forbidden always a magnet? Curiosity is only human.
Like Harry Potter’s Voldemort, I had become something that could not be named. I’m not sure those who cut me off realized that they had just handed me a boatload of soft power. The situation couldn’t last, and eventually my loved ones would come asking. All I had to do was sit back and wait.
Those of you who know me know there’s no ‘just’ about it, but my perspective had shifted.
And wow, did I need that.
Powerful is not something I feel very often. More since I took my career in a different direction, and every time I complete a workout, but even good labs are hard to connect to intentionality. Powerless definitely has the advantage.
In this situation, the 180-degree perspective change helped me breathe better, lessened my anxiety, and helped me relax into the parts of the situation I can’t control.
I wonder if I can apply this to all the other things that seem so capricious. I would definitely like to breathe better more often.