Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns can be found here.
The summer after I graduated from high school, I went to a backyard barbecue thrown by my new boyfriend. We’ll call him Zach (because that was his name). Zach was a talented artist and musician, hip and good-looking and cool in every way I wasn’t. We’d been dating for just a few weeks, and this was my first opportunity to meet his friends. I really liked this boy, so my motivation to make a good impression was high. After Zach introduced me around, I did what I often do when I want people to like me: I tried to make myself helpful.
I set myself up next to an improvised court where some of Zach’s friends were playing a friendly volleyball game. When the ball bounced out of bounds and rolled my direction, I chased it down, planning to toss it back to the players. This was my chance, I thought, to make that all-important first impression. Look, Kelly’s nice! She’s helpful! I didn’t realize that a different lawn game was taking place right behind me, and I walked straight into the path of an oncoming horseshoe.
When a metal horseshoe travels with some speed and connects with a human skull, the noise it makes is surprisingly like that of a gong. I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened—only that something, some incredibly loud and resonant something, had felled me. I can’t say with certainty whether I blacked out or just lay there on the lawn, stunned, but when I opened my eyes, the faces of all the people I’d met for the first time just minutes before loomed into my field of vision. And then their hands were on me.
They spoke in tongues. They commanded me to be healed. They anointed me in Jesus’s name. This touching and muttering went on for some minutes. Then they helped me stand up and went about the rest of the barbecue. I have a vague recollection of someone handing me a veggie burger.
Today, I’d wonder what kind of person wouldn’t call for help or offer somebody a ride to the hospital if she’s just sustained a head injury, but at the time their reaction didn’t seem particularly strange to me. All of us were “charismatics” (read: Pentecostals) at the time. Any given week, we were more likely to watch an impromptu exorcism in youth group than we were to sing something out of a hymnal. If there wasn’t a great deal of hand-raising and weeping and commanding of spirits, it wasn’t a real church service. And if you weren’t healed of a sickness or an injury after being prayed over, you simply—in a convenient if theologically hazy loophole—didn’t have adequate faith.
You just had to try enough. Have faith enough.
I’m no longer part of the church, and I haven’t been for years. I’d like to tell you that it’s different out here in the rest of the world; I’d like to say that it’s better and that people are more likely to give you a hand than lay hands on you, but I haven’t found that to be the case. When you’re visibly sick or disabled, everyone, whether friend or stranger, has something for you to put your faith in.
A few years ago, everyone was peddling yoga. You’ve really got try Bikram, strange women wearing Keen sandals would tell me, then talk a great deal about their breathing. After yoga, it was essential oils. In fact, the first time I found myself in the neurology intensive care unit, unable to speak or move, someone helpfully contacted me to suggest that I apply some lavender oils to relax, as if I were spending the day at a spa. Today, it’s the paleo diet—if you’re not already gnawing on meat and raw silage, someone will be very happy to tell you the manifold ways in which doing so will not only cure all your medical problems but also bring about world peace at the same time. A natural-healing practitioner told me of her suggested course of edible treatment, “you have to believe it’ll work.”
If you would just try enough, just have faith enough, you’d be healed.
I recognize that all of these suggestions, from going vegan to taking up pre-dawn calisthenics, come from a well-intentioned place. Those who want to lay hands on people or apply essential oils to them are, I believe, generally good people who don’t want to see others suffer. But whatever the impulse, the message I hear is “if you’re still sick, it’s your own damn fault. You’re not trying hard enough.”
Yoga is good exercise for those who can do it, but it’s not going to cure a neuromuscular disease. Lavender smells lovely, but won’t reverse the course of a progressive illness. I have eaten from every diet imaginable, and not a single one does me any more good than the next. And that’s okay with me.
In the past few years, I’ve found incredible power in disbelief. I no longer waste emotional energy scouring my conscience, asking myself whether I’m trying hard enough. I no longer feel compelled to down whatever suspicious-looking supplement a distant family member foists on me simply to appear as though I’m exploring every option. When my doctor says a new treatment has a 40 percent shot at helping, I assume he means 40 percent, not 100.
Not believing that I’ll be miraculously healed isn’t the same thing as no longer wanting to get well. Instead, it’s the understanding that it’s okay if I don’t. Rather than berate myself over whether I’m doing enough, I’ve decided to live as though I am enough. I don’t know what my life would look like if I were well, but this life—the one I have now—is a pretty good one. It’s enough.
Tags: kelly davio, the butter, the waiting room
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YES.
It’s enormously freeing to just admit, “I have a chronic illness, and managing the symptoms is actually a pretty decent victory.” People make interesting faces trying to wrap their heads around that one.
My therapist framed chronic depression that way–as something that one needs to manage, that will sometimes require accommodations, that is never going to be healed entirely. Something I’ll live with. Something that will affect the choices I make in my life–my career, my relationships, my priorities. Yeah, it is a little mind-blowing.
I’ve found that the stress from worrying about “curing” my depression just makes my depression worse. I now regard it as akin to diabetes, and life is much more pleasant. I’ve also learned to quickly jettison people who try to sell me on a “cure” that requires faith to make it work. Yeah, no, I’m just going to be over here with my therapy and my medicine and my acceptance of this long-term health condition, thanks.
How does one do this while also pushing oneself *within one’s boundaries* to try to get better?
for me, it looks like listening to my doctor and ignoring the rest of the noise.
For me, it involves a great deal of cost/benefit analysis. “I would probably feel better if I did X” requires an estimate of how much energy, Y, it will cost me. If the benefit outweighs the energy cost, then I’ll gently push myself to do it, while make sure that there’s somebody on Team Me who can act as an…emotional spotter? and provide backup without while still being willing to accept me as I am, even if I can’t do X.
I agree with all of this. For me, part of the cost/benefit analysis has involved rethinking some of my career goals–a couple of years ago I got out of one high-stress, low-pay, low-stability, emotionally taxing, job-equals-my-identity line of work (academia) and am trying to be damned sure I don’t get into another. (I particularly have to tell myself this when I start daydreaming about going to seminary.)
I would also add that taking care of my physical self–eating vegetables, moving around,getting plenty of sleep– is practically as important as therapy/antidepressants/mindfulness for the stability of my mental and emotional self. A good deal of my cost/benefit analysis goes like this: “Okay, I could go out and consume nachos and beer until the wee hours of the morning…or I could go to sleep at 10 pm and not set myself up for misery tomorrow.” That last part might just be a factor of not being 22 anymore, but still.
It’s so wonderful just being nice to yourself, rather than pretending to be somebody without your ailments, and being angry about not being that person.
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Count My Spoons.
“being angry about not being that person”
THIS. A million times this. It’s taken me years to *start* to come to a kind of peace with myself for not being the multiple-advance-degreed, suit-wearing, married-to-a-power-player woman I had thought I would be. Whether that was ever a possibility for me without severe depression is of course unknowable, but I still kept the image in my mind of that ‘me’ being something I had lost, rather than just one small possibility amongst a whole host of possibilities, including the stronger, relatively healthier person I am at this moment.
Seconding this, especially the cost-benefit analysis part. I also had to think about the expectations I was putting on myself to see if they were realistic or beneficial. Should I be continually beating myself up because I need to take sick leave more frequently than this coworker? Or would it be more valuable for me to take care of myself as necessary and maintain the abilities that I’m valued for? (Still fighting this one out. Probably will be for a while.)
That fight is not a fun one. “I need to take time off because I feel terrible! And now I feel terrible for taking time off because I feel terrible! Damnit!”
MrChouffe likens it to being short. Sometimes you can climb up on things to reach what you need, and sometimes you can reach them just fine without any boost or help. But sometimes, you’re going to need a ladder to get what you need, and there’s no shame in that. (The ladder can be any number of things, from antidepressants to CBT to _______, whatever works for that individual.)
That last paragraph is making me tear up a little bit here. Yes. Yes.
“I’ve decided to live as though I am enough.”
Amen and Amen!
Yes. This. I too am dealing with a chronic (I hope!) illness, and just had to defriend someone on facebook who was claiming that some diet not only cures cancer, but that “big medicine” is hiding that from us to get that sweet, sweet cancer money. Amen for disbelief.
Liked for the phrase “sweet, sweet cancer money.” All this kidney transplant talk I do is bullshit, you guys. I could cure myself with kale extract at any time, I’m just in it for the steady supply of delicious kidneys.
*Applause* Just all around awesome. 🙂
I am really hoping my MIL doesn’t follow me back from having just shared this article on FB but … my spouse warns me that she might have bought me *magic toxin extracting blocks of salt* that I’m supposed to apply to my feet to cure my plantar fasciitis.
I don’t want magic salt. I don’t want to hear another goddamned word about toxins. I just want to hear “Wow that must be painful. Marathon any good shows lately?”
wow, toxins giving people plantar fasciitis! Those toxins have been busier than I could ever have imagined! 😉
OH HELL YES.
Imagine my surprise that I’m not the only one whose been hit in the head by a metal horseshoe! Except I was five, and my mom was a nurse so they happily didn’t lay hands on me, just washed my bloody head and wouldn’t let me sleep for a few hours in case I had concussion.
I grew up evangelical mennonite. My realization that the messed-up-ness of many of my beliefs was hindering, not helping me, after a stint in mental health care facility, led to a much healthier (for me) but unpopular way of looking at the world. I don’t believe in things you can’t prove or explain in a satisfactory manner. Because when my “belief” in the unseen was at its strongest, I was locked up. And praying to Jesus in the midst of that intense belief led to … nada. Know what helped? Time, modern medicine (anti-anxiety meds, I’m still not positive the anti-psychotics did anything), and counselling from someone who actually knew about the human brain, not someone giving me Bible verses about how Jesus loves me and will protect me from harm.
Losing my faith helped. Realizing I didn’t have to tie my brain in knots over minute irrelevant theological puzzles. Meeting my current partner and being freed from repression, being loved without being confined. Also: puppies.
I have never slept better in my life. I rarely have insomnia. When my anxiety flares up, I have tools to deal with them much more effective than prayer, which loops round and round. Also I know that if I just need a blessed minute of rest and need extra help above and beyond the cognitive tools, there are pills for it.
Thanks for this very familiar and lovely read.
You are officially the second person I know to have been hit on the head with a horseshoe! (Though, having been 5 at the time, you have a far better excuse than I do for getting in such a bizarre accident!) I’m so happy to hear that you’ve found freedom and love out here on the other side.
wow, toxins giving people plantar fasciitis! Those toxins have been busier than I could ever have imagined! 😉
You are officially the second person I know to have been hit on the head with a horseshoe! (Though, having been 5 at the time, you have a far better excuse than I do for getting in such a bizarre accident!) I'm so happy to hear that you've found freedom and love out here on the other side.
Your last three paragraphs made me burst into tears out of the clear blue. Thank you.
As someone with a chronic illness who just got diagnosed yesterday with ANOTHER chronic illness (yay?), THANK YOU.
OH MY GOODNESS THANK YOU.
You are my new writing hero.
OH MY GOODNESS THANK YOU.
You are my new writing hero.