I’m teaching myself to regain focus after 12 years of surviving chronic pain and after I’ve had surgeries to relive the pain.
There is a focus shift that takes place when you have chronic pain. For me, it became a survival tactic to shift away from thinking heavily or giving focus to a task to simply getting from one room to the next, let alone try to drive somewhere, take a trip or visit with friends.
Did I still do things? I did. I did everything from grocery shopping to car camping for two-month stretches. When I did these things, they took all of my effort mentally and physically. The car camp trips were trips taken initially to let me get away from people. Then when I lived with Oldest Son, they were to get out of his way so he could have people visit him. They were great trips. I love driving; I love camping; I love traveling to different parts of the US. I did little on these trips because I couldn’t move much. So I’d find a beautiful place, park, camp and maybe drive once in a while to sight see. I did not walk. I did not move my body. It hurt too much.
Forget visiting with friends all these years. I let most of them go, but even the ones who stayed didn’t know I could barely muster the strength, focus or energy to get together the very few times I did during this dark decade. Mostly what I could muster was to go somewhere where I could be in pain, in isolation, alone.
Now, I’m 8 months and 4 months out from two surgeries that resolved most of my pain. And it’s stunning to experience this difference. My brain and my body are learning to know one another again in a friendly way instead of a way that simply kept me alive. All of this, combined with learning to face the lingering impact of domestic abuse and the poor skills I took into that life from an utterly dysfunctional family, has made my days so much brighter. Granted, I’m in the beginning of this new brain body journey and still battling the perceptions of people outside of my experience who are shoving me toward their need for me to be uber productive based on their estimations.
But. I don’t want to show up that way in this life anymore. I want a fresh approach.
To explain a bit, my children have kindly supported me financially through this dark decade. Daughter has cut ties with me. Oldest Son is emotionally spent regarding how he feels about this time. Youngest Son still has compassion for me. The anger Daughter and Oldest Son hold is that they can’t conceive that I have not had a job all this time. They don’t have a clue the mental strength it took to decide to stay at some points. Daughter, in particular, has been vocally vile toward me in several outbursts where she has called me a fucking idiot and stupid. It’s frustrating because there is this combination of her being tired of waiting for me to change things, her violent father’s influence on her worldview, her assumption her husband’s family is a model of an ideal family and likely many things I don’t know about that have pushed her over the edge in her decision to estrange from me, including not allowing me to talk to my grandson or finally try to figure out a relationship with her husband who I barely know. It’s another layer of exhaustion.
Focus. It’s something I haven’t had for years. My mind could not settle into staying with a task or a project or any long-term thing for so long because pain would hijack everything. So now I’m learning to focus again. I‘m learning to stay with something by doing the thing for short periods. It’s a little like physical therapy. I’m taking that model into my mental practices. The sessions of physical therapy gave me the list of strength training to do. Then, at home in between sessions, it was my job to take that list and make it a practice, including sustained and static stretching. The sustained and static stretching for me was the most productive. At first it was a few seconds-and I mean only a few seconds. Now I can sustain a stretch for minutes. Seems like a small increase, but it’s wonderful. My body shows me every day how amazing it is. My brain is doing the same. I’m moving into The Years of Growth and it’s fucking exciting.
Here are some of the things I’m doing to regain focus:
1-Practice quiet (while that could sound counterintuitive since I lived in such isolation for such a long time, it’s crucial-my pain brain could not be silent before.) Now it’s a pain-free practice I was not sure I would ever have.
2-Sustained stretching-this helps my brain understand my body can again do the things I ask of it.
3-Writing - what you’re reading now is part of my mind body practice.
4-Listening to books - a minimum of two pages of any book (this almost always turns into many pages). I don’t read physical books anymore. I use an iPhone and an iPad, so I use the system’s accessibility function called VoiceOver Recognition and turn it on for every book. It reads to me in any voice I choose from the settings. I can read along while it speaks or I can let it speak the book to me and not read along, which I do most often. It’s not as pleasing as an audio book read by an author, but it’s free and it works extremely well. I love it.
These four things are where I am at the moment. It’s August of 2023 and 10 & 4 months post surgery. I’m excited for a future again because it includes hope now, something I lost for a very long time.
Stay tuned, it’s going to be a fun trip.