Thanks to conversations with my boss and a counselor about my severe burnout, several days off here and there for rest and rejuvenation, hormones starting to regulate so my suspected peri-menopausal symptoms aren’t as bad, and more days of actual honest to God decent sleep…I’m feeling better than I was when I wrote my last post.
But I’m not out of the woods yet.
Taekwondo has been one of my greatest teachers, as have my body and my changing relationship to it. If the severe insomnia was a lesson in coming to a screeching halt to stop the pain and suffering, my Achilles tendon has been a lesson in examining the overarching themes surrounding the pain and suffering.
Achilles tendon, you say? What fresh injury hell have I placed myself in now?
Okay, so yeah, I’ve been having really bad pain in my Achilles tendon for several months now. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before on the blog. It first cropped up ten years ago when I was nearing black belt, but it eventually went away. Now, on the cusp of forty-six, my injuries and pain usually don’t just “go away.” I noticed it when I was doing high impact stuff like Body Combat at the gym and taekwondo. At first it was just a nagging achiness, and then it would become excruciating. Other times, suddenly moving after long periods of inactivity or even just wearing the wrong shoes would set my tendon and surrounding ankle tissue on fire. I’m not doing taekwondo nearly as much as I used to (these days I only train twice a week), but the stabby burny white hot devil pain in my foot didn’t seem to care.
Typical me, I ignored it and figured it would go away. Because all my problems just conveniently go away when I wish them to…HA!
After getting treatment from a specialist for a while that was kind of helping but not giving answers, I finally got an MRI on my ankle. (Side note: the MRI machines aren’t as freaking loud as they used to be. Think F4 tornado instead of F5. Almost pleasant!) According to the MRI, there’s no acute injury like a tear or rupture. It’s tendonosis, degenerative breakdown that can happen over time if you’re old like me and do a sport that’s rough on the body.
Much like the irony wasn’t lost on me that getting literally knocked off my feet with the ACL tear forced me to make major changes in my life, the irony that my own perfectionist, punishing, too-busy-to-actually-take-care-of-things need to be occupied and busy all the GD time was literally my “Achilles heel” wasn’t lost either. The ACL tear happened when life in general was dramatically awful. These last several months have been dramatically busy with a few awful things sprinkled in. If the ACL tear was a blazing five alarm fire, the Achilles tendon pain has been more like, “Hey, do you smell something? Nah, everything’s fine…oh wait, shit.”
As the label on my Mooto uniform said ten years ago, “I am my own nemesis,” once again. (We’re bringing back all the Little Black Belt classics today.) I’m Achilles, and the arrow is how I’ve been running my life.
It’s me, hi, I’m the arrow, it’s me.
I thought I was winning at life over the last several months personally and professionally, but I was really just furiously spinning my wheels and going nowhere. Things started to break down. I was frustrated that I seemed to be doing so much and yet accomplishing so little at the same time. I don’t need the start-at-zero reset I was forced to have after my ACL injury and surgeries, but I need to make some changes and stop ignoring the literal and metaphorical lingering pain, even when I claim that it’s “not that bad.”
On episode 610 of the “Afford Anything” podcast, author and chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price Sebastien Page shared an interesting and even provocative thought around goal-related blindness: “Those that are really good at keeping themselves safe are really good at quitting.” They know when to slow down, turn around, and even stop. My goal-related blindness or really just the deeply ingrained need to be a “good girl” made me blind to the pain I was causing myself.
Moderation. Balance. Learning when to lean in and when to back off. For someone who is used to extremes, that’s not always easy or natural, but it’s doable. Today on a non-weekend day off I ended up adding a long errand to my other morning errands because it was something that needed attention sooner rather than later. When I finally got home, I read and took a long nap. That may still be going from one extreme to the other (who runs a bunch of errands on their day off?), but at least I slowed down and stopped when my body and brain needed rest.
That’s a good start.
