Patterns of Injury

My legs are deliciously sore. Because I haven't been doing my physical therapy and I have been lazy in exercising.
My new physical therapist had me stop running until we could build up the lower back and SI joint that the doctors are thinking is the real problem with my hip and locking pains. Last week I got to start running again, but only twice and at broken intervals of 2 minutes. Then he did a gate analysis on my run. I was on a treadmill so that likely made my gate different.
A few interesting things were found:
1. I am taking too long of strides and this can be problematic. This is interesting because as a competitive runner in high school it was always about lengthening your stride, but now the goal, or at least my goal is to get more steps per minute. We used a metronome to make this happen. Apparently 160 is what is best for me to decrease risk of injury.
2. I am too high. My stride that is. I am almost jumping in my stride. The more steps per minute help bring me back down so I am spending more energy going forward instead of up. This is interesting because it also reminds me of high school running when I learned to pump my arms straight, breaking the natural cross-over pattern people's arms follow when running, thus putting your energy into moving forward instead of side to side. This too high is also rather comical because... well, I am too high and needed a mood stabilizer to bring me down so that I had the energy to move forward.
3. I swing my right leg. This is very strange and I am not sure how or why I do this at the point of the gate analysis, but as I have run since I have reflected on this a bit. I feel that my injury had my foot loose like an over-stretched elastic that no longer returns to its normal size. I remember getting out of the car after the car accident that injured this ankle and feeling like one side of my body was now longer than the other. So it makes sense that while running I would feel a need to swing this longer over stretched leg. I have been doing it for so long now that it will take conscious effort to correct. This is so true of all the adaptive behaviors we do.
I have been fighting to understand my mood instabilities and discrepancies and trying to take care of it myself for so long that it is taking significant effort to correct some of these behaviors. I don't really need to work so hard to understand anymore because I think I understand it really well now but rather I need to figure out how to stop trying to figure it out because that is such a ingrained habit now. Yet that is not nearly as significant or as difficult as learning to not try to do it all on my own. That part is tricky. Especially since self reliance and independence is a highly valued trait in my culture and society.
What is also interesting about this gate problem and the correcting of it is that I am relearning things that have come very naturally to me and I used to be very talented at, but that were dramatically effected by an initially overlooked and seemingly insignificant injury that was left untreated for too long.
This is a pattern that is common in many ways and many lives.
But what I love about this new pain is that I feel muscles alive and working in ways they have not felt in a very long time. Somehow shortening my stride is making those muscles come back to life. And that makes me happy even if it also causes some pain.

hearts and heads and husbands

Hearts and heads and husbands
these things are so hard to keep straight
My heart wants to be there for my cousin
my head says it is impractical
and my husband says he supports whatever decision I make
but my heart doesn't want to use and abuse him -it's impractical and costly at this point-
my head doesn't want to either and my head says it's impractical but still maybe important
and my heart
is treacherous half of the time
it has betrayed me and my husband before
so...
how on earth does a person ever come to a decision on such important matters as
loving ones cousin and hoping for them to feel that love? and to know how cherished they really are in spite of time and distance?
...and yet (and of course) the situation is much more complex than I can explain here or maybe even at all.

Our garbage can doesn't know the answer either.
I could not even beat an answer out of it
but it did not mind the beating at all
I am glad for that massive blue bin
provided to us by the city
it will take a beating and doesn't mind at all.
it even makes a pleasant sound letting me know it is happy to take it.
It probably feels a bit alive as I forcefully kick the complicated and perplexing energy of life into it,
...this big blue inanimate insentient can.

...Last night husband opened up about his anger, confusion, frustration, shame, and betrayal, from the previous months (now about a year) of my treacherous heart...
He has handled it heroic, for sure...
But how does one ever make decisions with a treacherous heart, a brain that breaks, and emotions that feel far too intensely?

"At this point it is not the physical pain that hurts the most (and this applies to adults as well as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all."
-Viktor Frankl

Artificial Intelligence

I am tired.
Working but on break.
Sometimes I get requests for answers on Quora.com so I visit there periodically and read what others have to say. I am shocked and amazed at some of the experiences people have. I am appalled at the way countertransference and/or a therapists feelings toward clients are handled by so many. I am surprised to hear how far people have gone into these places.
It is so strange.
It is strange to hear the similarities and differences. At times I can see and understand why ex-therapist Dr. He would avoid me and treat me like the plaque. But the problem is I am not those people and I am also not the plague. And if I am those people then that is just further evidence of how he screwed up or was screwing with me intentionally.
One thing I am struck with is the intensity of emotion people feel in therapy and the strange detached sympathetic apathy the therapist is somehow supposed to feel and maintain. I don't understand this and something feels very wrong about it.
I see that the environment is artificial and quite fantastic in it's make up so it is not surprising that people who are looking for real help to real problems in their real realities can get so turned upside down.
It is not a real environment.
It may be something more like LARPing really. If you are not familiar with that term LARP refers to Live Action Role Play.
I think it would likely be beneficial if therapists would disclose this from the beginning.
A disclaimer
something like: "It is important for you to know and remember that this is an artificial environment designed for you to discuss and work through your issues, but it is not real nor reality. So remember no matter how close you may feel to me and no matter the intensity of your emotions toward me they are not real and they are not reciprocated. They are artificial and so am I" maybe to be followed up with, "no matter how much you may think you feel it I do not actually love you and you are simply a paycheck to me."
I think that would have been much more helpful than, "I will never have anything to do with you outside of therapy because I could see myself falling in love with you." That statement and others just intensified the extremely intense and apparently artificial emotions and connection I was feeling. And then denying it and being unwilling to clarify or allow me clarification, to tackle the situation for what it was just reinforced the fantasy when I was in a pretty fantastic place already.
Then it starts to appear that it was a worst case scenario.
Could it be that he really could not handle me and he would use me and abuse me no matter what? Could it be that he really had feelings but knew all the stuff I am reading and so then convinced himself that I am a statistic and not a human? Or was he actually intentionally grooming? The way it was handled suggests that it was.
And the thing is, this therapeutic environment was not a typical one, I was just there to address head injury, we never even got into anything deep or very personal.
This therapy creature is a bit scary.

Shattered Worlds

Life is too short

and so very tragic

how is it our worlds can be shattered so many times?

and we have to keep picking up the pieces. Keep going...

my cousins

Oh, my beautiful cousins

only two on my mom's side

...but now we are down to one...

And my cousin, his sister,

I know how her heart breaks 

only she has no other siblings to help her pick up her pieces and survive

and no mom either

her mom is the one who died falling from the sky when my one remaining cousin was one. 

How our worlds can be shattered.

we all go through it

but some more than others. 

....my head hurt before, 

it really hurts now

But my heart is strong now for the survivors

Life is too short...

Please God, love my cousin and help him to find his mom and his cousin (my own brother) in heaven or wherever they hide. 

Please God, help and watch over our sweet beautiful cousin whose heart is broken and breaking and feels so very left alone...

Words

they only fall short

...yet silence can be so much worse...

a different person.

Twice today I am told, "you are a different person" in a good way. I am hearing this a lot lately.
I am.
And I am not.
I am happy to hear this and I am happy I can talk about things without the flood of tears that had been accompanying way too frequently.
I am glad that I feel so much more level and rational on a more consistent basis.
I am happy about it and motivated.
I come home and take care of some things I have been needing to get more consistent about. I edit an essay and offer revisions. I find myself looking at the process of applying to a graduate program.
I find it a bit hard to focus on reading things like what I need to read to figure that kind of stuff out.
Maybe it is just because I am out of practice.
So I keep going knowing it will get easier.
It does.
But really it does not.
My head starts to feel swimmy and it all starts to feel like a giant load of ... fake
Games
foolishness.
Maybe because I am trying to read about the professors of psychology and their interests of studies and how to get into a PhD program with them.
It is silliness and ego
and maybe I am too jaded for this field now.
But the real problem is that this intense focus is making my head hurt and feel swimmy. So I stop. I am shaky. Very shaky.
I am sensing frustration from my husband. Our kids need to help out more.
I try to get them going with helping to take care of stuff. My son pushes back, for no good reason, probably just because he is a kid and that is what they so often do...
But I explode. I am yelling at him.
... Now my husband is even more annoyed and my head is swimmy and my ears are ringing and so shaky and I don't understand why. I begin to cry because I can't keep up, because I want so badly to do these curricular things but I don't know if I am actually physically capable.
I am a different person but my cognitive stamina is not... It is still too low for me.
And the yelling and crying is just further evidence of that.
I will try to get more sleep, eat less sugar and adjust a few things in hopes that tomorrow it will be better... But it is hard to accept and I don't want to.
It is especially hard because I don't have my "head injury expert" team to help me figure this out...
"there is something pathological to that" says Dr. Concussion the last time I saw her.
"pathological? explain," I ask. She does and to it I say, "Thank you for recognizing that."
But she still would not see or help me. She tells me she will help me find a new team. But then her response two weeks later when I followed up was she could not find one with the qualifications I need so I should just go through my insurance and have the wrist doctor refer to the neurologist. My insurance and others say go to them but the problem is they will not see me because of my "previous undisclosed" pathology that I was trying to show them and explain the whole time.
...
They refuse to see me and treat me but they continue to bill.
How on earth can this be ethical and okay?
It's not.
but I have no voice and no rights and no protection.
And that is why I will keep talking.
I'm tired.
but strangely hopeful again
as I have written it out to speak out.

Why do our hearts betray us?

There other day, at physical therapy, I talked with a beautiful lady whose fun, short, wavy, perfect hair I was coveting. She told me she hacked it because she is going through a divorce and in her bright blue eyes that can't hide her pain I saw pieces of me.
Hacking hair as a way to severe -almost literally- the attachments to boys who did not value. That was a pattern of my past that I did not really think was a pattern until I saw a mirror of me in this lovely lady.
That was something interesting, but the thing I saw in her that stirred me the most was her pain as she spoke of her exes. This lady loves and loves deeply. She is beautiful, lively and fun. But she is also in deep heart-wrenching pain. I know the pain. I can see it in her and I know it but I cannot feel it right now. I cannot allow myself to feel it again. I will not. I cannot take her pain and I know this, so I don't try to.
Instead I want her to feel the love I think she deserves to feel but I can't give that either because it is not my place and I am not the person for the job anyway.
Heartbreaking.
And I am struck with confounding wonder about our hearts that are so treacherous at times.
How is it we can love and be hurt so deeply?
How is it our human hearts can love so deeply and completely somebody who does not return it?
We are told to trust our heart but I am beginning to wonder if this is very smart, as treacherous as they can be.
They betray us.
Why?
This is so confusing to me.
Like the way that it felt like a dagger puncturing and twisting so many times over so many months.
How do we survive?
Our bodies are so strong and resilient
and yet I am positive these breaks take there toll.
I hope this beautiful lady finds a love that will last and bring joy that is equal or better than the pain she is feeling right now. ..and yet if she does, eventually one will be lost at very least to the process of mortality and then a heart will be deeply wounded again. Which is probably the real reason no one lives forever in these mortal frames.
May our hearts be settled in forever and until then I pray they may bare the burdens of breaking, time and again.
And I pray we will be kind to each other.