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Self-Care Tip #181 – Look for help if your pain never becomes something more than pain. Be a friend to yourself.
Glee is back! I’m so glad because it makes great work-out distraction. Good music, drama, beautiful people, and wonderful ah-ha concepts like,
Use your pain and loneliness to inspire you to make something beautiful.
Can’t remember it verbatim though and I noticed after an hour surfing the web for Mercedes quotes (and getting detoured to all sorts of other fun stuff for grazing) that whoever writes these quotes up didn’t find this one worth it.
Joni Eareckson Tada on the Larry King Show said that when she thanked God for her paralysis, she began to be productive through what paralysis offered.
It is however sometimes impossible to take what hurts and let it fuel our fires. Sometimes it’s just a cold lump of coal. Sometimes, we aren’t adaptable.
Luckily we aren’t sitting in a cave during the ice-age and can trust that a bear won’t come and eat us when we are wounded. But there are other predators. In my line of work, I could call disease process a preying force. It takes over more and more cells, space, grey matter, consuming bits of our identity and changing our ability to cope with stress.
It’s easy for people to say, “Turn your pain into energy for creativity,” as if it were a volitional option for you like it was a choice for them. Or we call it bits of morality; maybe a fourth of an inch on the rim of our gold crown we get in heaven. Those of us who care about that crown look at our shoes, apologize and promise to try harder.
It is not easy to explain these apologies and inactivity to someone who has never been immobilized by mental illness. Even those of us who have experienced it first hand have a hard time remembering the real texture of what we went through once it is passed. Illness can be so awful that even our subconscious shudders when turned back to remember. It is no wonder that we find it difficult to explain.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we aren’t able to adapt, aren’t elastic and sit stunned in the presence of pain, immobile to the newness that it can offer – recognize this as a flag to turn towards medical help.
Question: What was/is your story when you weren’t able to adapt well to stress? When you didn’t adapt well, what helped/helps you hope for more? How did you find it? Please tell me your story.
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