I’m pretty used to chronic pain. Or I should say that I’ve had a lot of time in my life where it was the norm. Then I started to dance at 40 and I got rid of most of it for the majority of that decade.
Something might come up here and there but I made a little effort around it and it was gone in no time.
Because that’s how things work, right? You put in effort and you get rewarded.
No.
SOMETIMES that is how things work. Sometimes rewards simply are not on their way no matter what you do.
My strong and very healthy shoulders six years ago.
There can be a million reasons for this, unique to each human, but when we assume that effort brings reward, this leads to the moralizing of effort which then leads to judgement of humans we think are not “efforting” enough.
It’s the basis of all ableism (and of toxic capitalism that says enough effort can bring wealth to anyone no matter what but I’m focusing on body issues here and that is a whole book in and of itself).
This year, I’ve been dealing with a shoulder tear. Not bad enough to warrant surgery (which I want to avoid and my doctor agrees) but bad enough that I lost a ton of mobility and was in constant pain and had a hard time sleeping etc. I got a shot and that helped enough to let me start doing serious P.T. on myself.
Which has increased my mobility but I’m still only at a B grade.
Now, I’ve always been extremely mobile and very strong, so my idea of an A grade is different than a majority of humans, but I’m not willing at this age to give up on that. Because that’s a slippery slope right there.
All of that brings me to a few nights ago when I was crying to Craig about the progress I was making not being enough and not being fast enough and what if this is IT!?!?
That’s when it really hit me that I’ve always bought into the ableist crap of effort = reward.
Any doctor I’ve ever had for issues like this can’t get over the effort I put in. They say “no one does that. People want pills and surgery.”
I work hard and I’m consistent. And I stay consistent over long periods of time. I am stubborn in those good ways (and some bad ones but alas…).
And still… with all my stubborn consistency, hard work, and the knowledge I have about what to do and how, I am still not healed.
There are two things here that I want to emphasize.
First, sometimes we think we’re not getting the reward for our effort because it’s happening too slowly and in too small increments to notice. So we give up or we dilute our efforts and this then proves to us that we are not succeeding and “SEE!?!? This is why it’s not worth it!!! NOTHING is happening!” Self fulfilling prophecy type stuff.
I myself — Ms. Stubborn — have been tempted to give up in this very way.
Second, sometimes we’re simply not going to succeed. Sometimes things are worse than people can know. Sometimes there are circumstances that simply cannot be overcome.
This is hard. As a culture, we want to believe that there’s always the possibility of success.
But sometimes the success we need is the redefinition of what that looks like for us, the altering of expectations, the release of a strict goal so that we can move forward and start in a new way.
I believe that there’s ALMOST always room for improvement and space to create new mobility and strength, but sometimes this will look different than we want it to, and that’s got to be okay.