Change often requires a leap of faith: a leap of faith requires you to jump first. A bumble bee by design shouldn't be able to fly and yet it does :)
This last 4-5 weeks have been a revelation to me (as you may be aware). My overriding theme for this year which I set in January for a year-long Art Journal Project was “Letting Go”, the keyword being “Freedom” and nearly 5 weeks ago, I had surgery on my elbow.
I had had tennis elbow in my right elbow for over 2 years, which meant that:
• I was unable to quilt/sew for any great length of time;
• I could not hold a pen or a pencil to draw for more than a hour or so of concentration;
• Using a computer mouse sometimes sent shooting pains up and down my right arm;
• I could not bend my wrist up without pain; and
• Periodically I had to rest and support the elbow and have cortisone injections into the joint, and I hate needles.
Sometimes I couldn’t carry anything of great weight and driving a distance usually hurt, and for someone whose “closest” blood relatives are over 180 miles away, doing nothing was not really an option, given that it’s usually me who visits them. So I sought surgery, being told it could be done using the “keyhole” technique, and for some reason, that seemed very re-assuring and I gave little thought to it. I was told that a small insertion would be made, any debris around the tendon removed and the tendon would be slightly removed from the bone and allowed to heal naturally. It wasn’t until nearly the surgery (and afterwards) that the realities hit me (and luckily I had opted for a stay overnight, as ordinarily the procedure’s done as a day patient, for I was horribly sick from the sedation and codeine given to me: not the best time to find that you’re hypersensitive to morphine and codeine, given that I was already on alert for my allergy to sticking plasters and surgical tape – big, red, painful rashes and welts, not pretty with iodine, if triggered).
Ordinarily I’m a worrier, coming from a long-line of worriers, but I consciously made the decision not to worry too early before the surgery and then to try not to worry too much, but as someone wishing to re-start quilting, with plans to start a drawing course in the New Year, I suddenly thought “what if I can’t do…” after the surgery? And all the dreams and plans, some of which were still newly forming suddenly seemed a long way away. My fears were real, and the thought of pulling out of the surgery option began to grow, but despite the fears and nerves, I went through with it. You might think “No big deal”, but I’m really a control freak, and letting someone take a knife to you requires great trust and I had started to make plans for a future that might not be possible if surgery failed but I took the chance and ignored my usual loathing of hospitals as my previous experiences of hospital had not been good.
After the operation, my arm wrapped in a bandage and throbbing from the 4cm insertion, I was intermittently taking pain-killers and anti-emetics whilst at hospital, and was sent home with more codeine and ibuprofen with the strict instructions to carry on taking them. The first night home I dreamt of elves, but by 48 hours of codeine I was having night terrors, so I stopped the codeine as soon as I could. The thing that got me through that darkest night was a small light, little more than a glow, that I saw in my dream state. The light was not real and was little more than an impression of light, but it gradually grew from the dark after I said to myself “I accept myself as I am”. Again this might not be your big deal but for me this was a first as I’ve always been so hard on myself as a person because others were cruel to me, an unseen, unacknowledged (by me) beautiful soul, so giving myself acceptance was a powerful thing in the dark and kept further terrors away – a leap of faith in the dark…
The nightmare state and the light I saw got me thinking, and just before my surgery I had had a good counselling session, so as the days of recovery clocked up I was reflecting on these. I’d been set the task to focus on the here and now and since then, had found it possible without my past interfering. A result from that counselling session and the next session was I felt different, I felt unblocked, my pain had finally been seen, listened to and acknowledged, so that I felt that I no longer needed to remember it or hold it like a cloak around me to keep me “safe”. And taking that with the nightmares being stopped by an affirming light, it suddenly felt like a weight had been lifted. The counsellor said that talking to me she had suddenly physically felt the weight I had been under and now suddenly I felt that weight and then felt it leave. Suddenly I felt I could now forget those really sticky, horrible, ugly moments from my past as it came to me that they had had their time, nothing had changed, and whilst they had felt safe to be in, to hold onto, they were detaching me from my present and all the infinite possibilities a moment might hold that had been passing me by without registering. It was then that I found gratitude, for my hubby and son for putting up with me, for realising what a control freak I had been and letting go of my resistance to help and acceptance.
And so it was a week ago that I discharged myself from counselling as I felt I had reached a place for the first time where I could walk at least part of this journey with myself, unguided by others, using my intuition as the map and compass, and so far I’m OK. Last week was the first Back-to-School day that I didn’t binge to push down the feeling of loneliness or of “stopping being a full-time mum”, because I didn’t feel that despite the change from holiday mum to term-time mum, because nothing had really changed, so I didn’t feel sad and I’ve stopped watching daytime television as I’m sure that only served to keep me down. The revelations (leaps of faith whatever) have changed my outlook and feelings on the past and the mental weight and my physical weight are going – I’ve lost 6lb since the surgery and fear levels are decreasing too.
It’s still all new, and yes scary, but also exciting, and I have further surgery in a few weeks – to remove my gallbladder this time, but the good thing about the future is that it only comes to you one moment at a time. Sometimes you just have to do it, and jump.
This last 4-5 weeks have been a revelation to me (as you may be aware). My overriding theme for this year which I set in January for a year-long Art Journal Project was “Letting Go”, the keyword being “Freedom” and nearly 5 weeks ago, I had surgery on my elbow.
I had had tennis elbow in my right elbow for over 2 years, which meant that:
• I was unable to quilt/sew for any great length of time;
• I could not hold a pen or a pencil to draw for more than a hour or so of concentration;
• Using a computer mouse sometimes sent shooting pains up and down my right arm;
• I could not bend my wrist up without pain; and
• Periodically I had to rest and support the elbow and have cortisone injections into the joint, and I hate needles.
Sometimes I couldn’t carry anything of great weight and driving a distance usually hurt, and for someone whose “closest” blood relatives are over 180 miles away, doing nothing was not really an option, given that it’s usually me who visits them. So I sought surgery, being told it could be done using the “keyhole” technique, and for some reason, that seemed very re-assuring and I gave little thought to it. I was told that a small insertion would be made, any debris around the tendon removed and the tendon would be slightly removed from the bone and allowed to heal naturally. It wasn’t until nearly the surgery (and afterwards) that the realities hit me (and luckily I had opted for a stay overnight, as ordinarily the procedure’s done as a day patient, for I was horribly sick from the sedation and codeine given to me: not the best time to find that you’re hypersensitive to morphine and codeine, given that I was already on alert for my allergy to sticking plasters and surgical tape – big, red, painful rashes and welts, not pretty with iodine, if triggered).
Ordinarily I’m a worrier, coming from a long-line of worriers, but I consciously made the decision not to worry too early before the surgery and then to try not to worry too much, but as someone wishing to re-start quilting, with plans to start a drawing course in the New Year, I suddenly thought “what if I can’t do…” after the surgery? And all the dreams and plans, some of which were still newly forming suddenly seemed a long way away. My fears were real, and the thought of pulling out of the surgery option began to grow, but despite the fears and nerves, I went through with it. You might think “No big deal”, but I’m really a control freak, and letting someone take a knife to you requires great trust and I had started to make plans for a future that might not be possible if surgery failed but I took the chance and ignored my usual loathing of hospitals as my previous experiences of hospital had not been good.
After the operation, my arm wrapped in a bandage and throbbing from the 4cm insertion, I was intermittently taking pain-killers and anti-emetics whilst at hospital, and was sent home with more codeine and ibuprofen with the strict instructions to carry on taking them. The first night home I dreamt of elves, but by 48 hours of codeine I was having night terrors, so I stopped the codeine as soon as I could. The thing that got me through that darkest night was a small light, little more than a glow, that I saw in my dream state. The light was not real and was little more than an impression of light, but it gradually grew from the dark after I said to myself “I accept myself as I am”. Again this might not be your big deal but for me this was a first as I’ve always been so hard on myself as a person because others were cruel to me, an unseen, unacknowledged (by me) beautiful soul, so giving myself acceptance was a powerful thing in the dark and kept further terrors away – a leap of faith in the dark…
The nightmare state and the light I saw got me thinking, and just before my surgery I had had a good counselling session, so as the days of recovery clocked up I was reflecting on these. I’d been set the task to focus on the here and now and since then, had found it possible without my past interfering. A result from that counselling session and the next session was I felt different, I felt unblocked, my pain had finally been seen, listened to and acknowledged, so that I felt that I no longer needed to remember it or hold it like a cloak around me to keep me “safe”. And taking that with the nightmares being stopped by an affirming light, it suddenly felt like a weight had been lifted. The counsellor said that talking to me she had suddenly physically felt the weight I had been under and now suddenly I felt that weight and then felt it leave. Suddenly I felt I could now forget those really sticky, horrible, ugly moments from my past as it came to me that they had had their time, nothing had changed, and whilst they had felt safe to be in, to hold onto, they were detaching me from my present and all the infinite possibilities a moment might hold that had been passing me by without registering. It was then that I found gratitude, for my hubby and son for putting up with me, for realising what a control freak I had been and letting go of my resistance to help and acceptance.
And so it was a week ago that I discharged myself from counselling as I felt I had reached a place for the first time where I could walk at least part of this journey with myself, unguided by others, using my intuition as the map and compass, and so far I’m OK. Last week was the first Back-to-School day that I didn’t binge to push down the feeling of loneliness or of “stopping being a full-time mum”, because I didn’t feel that despite the change from holiday mum to term-time mum, because nothing had really changed, so I didn’t feel sad and I’ve stopped watching daytime television as I’m sure that only served to keep me down. The revelations (leaps of faith whatever) have changed my outlook and feelings on the past and the mental weight and my physical weight are going – I’ve lost 6lb since the surgery and fear levels are decreasing too.
It’s still all new, and yes scary, but also exciting, and I have further surgery in a few weeks – to remove my gallbladder this time, but the good thing about the future is that it only comes to you one moment at a time. Sometimes you just have to do it, and jump.
x
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