Enter Label: Recovery update (#7)
On bears and silent milestones
Dear Companions,
Bears don't dance. If you find one dancing, it likely underwent extensive behavioral training — the old-fashioned way, through torture. As illustrated in the The Bear in our Backyard, by Jill Lepore:
To break a bears wild spirit, the Kalandars punctured it nose often with a hot metal poker, and looped a rope or chain through the oozing wound. Then they removed the young bears claws and bashed out its teeth, sometimes locking the animals snout in a muzzle full of nails.
This part of the recovery journey is hard to describe, fraught with competing ideas. The things which heal suddenly suffocate too, the blessings and curses get mixed up together.
As I push out further to sea in the recovery, I can find myself wrapped up in the steel iron grip of freedom, singing Tool’s Undertow at the top of my lungs in the car, only to find that after some time, I’m too far out too sea, I can't swim well yet, and so come slopping back to shore, breathless, tired, in pain…Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up you're saturating me, how could I let this bring me, back to my knees? I get excited, I get thrown off balance, I’m back in the muck. And this can happen ten times in a day, and that is maddening.
One time at dinner, which I was surprised to find myself enjoying almost entirely, despite quite obvious sensations cracking beneath my skull, finally a master at the duality of joy alongside (a certain level of) pain, and so I remember thinking clearly, and definitely for the first time in years, I want a cigarette.
Mind you, I have not smoked in years, that casual recreation dying many years before the pandemic. But how that lust curled back into my throat upon a carbonated sip of L’s IPA as we sat at the dock with family and ate burgers, and things off the kids menu, as though a cigarette were the absolute pinnacle of health, to be able to inhale smoke and receive pleasure, rather than nausea, or blinding pain, a litmus test for carelessness, for living in the moment, for conversation that can last for hours, for school days, for sneaking around.
So I ask myself, is that lust or temptation, is that the bear emerging from a solitary cave, the spontaneous and savage me, breathing itself back into my heart? And is it my illness or my healing practice that is torturing my wild spirit and preventing it from taking over? In the journey, it’s easy to get confused, it’s easy to misdirect one’s anger and blame one’s imprisonment on the healing practice, thinking: Bears don’t dance. And so, little promises get broken, and lines in the sand get marked, and then erased— two steps forward and one step back…
How tiresome it is to repeat some of the things—pacing, adjusting, breath work, shutting down, diet, feeling compressed, stuffed in, and cornered, measuring these silent milestones in this long-ass tally, in a book that nobody else will read, and certainly not, if I never get well. And similarly how tiring is it to still wake up in pain, and still be learning all these lessons, and still be struggling.
So I get these tastes of freedom, and I want to abandon the very things that got me there, naturally. I find myself not just skipping, but forgetting, the second 20 minute breathing session in a day, even though I know that one in particular is the one that clinical studies prove is a necessity for improving HRV. So I got stuck on Week 3-4 of that 10 week practice.
Or I forgo my keto light diet, in favor of cooking for family so I can show my love to them, even though I end up eating some of my creation tailored to their taste and not my diet. I vow to return to proper form in August.
And so it goes, pushing when I need to rest because I want to be normal, because I want to hunt, and not just for salmon but the rotting pile of garlic bread in the trash. And then feeling not so great from hanging out in garbage, and vowing to return to form because thats the only thing that can save me.
But sometimes I get away with it. Sitting and talking for longer than I am meant to. Going out to dinner twice in a week, even three times (once!), something I could not do at all last summer. Maintaining my eye on a new recipe, getting ingredients, and actually making it all in the same day—what a milestone!
Doing 500 yards in the pool now is something I have done 4 or 5 times now. Sure, not all straight freestyle, in fact, about half is kicking or sidestroke, or the backwards butterfly I did in warm down as a kid, but still, there’s more vitality. I catch myself gliding through the water, moving, moving, beautifully, and it feels so good to be sailing through water, to be ensconced, to become nothing but the echo beneath the surface, to forget about my head, and the past two years, and the pandemic I’m still inside. And then I find a wall. And I’m nowhere again.
I’m milestone-ing in the era of silent milestones. I can’t talk about them much. I want to tell everyone when I do something new, an extra few minutes on the phone, a 4 hour work session, more concentration, or extra socializing. But it’s delicate. Now is not the time to start celebrating. And not just because none of this is yet effortless or normal (or without consequence), or that the gains are smaller, fractional at times, but I have learned that to unlearn pain, one cannot reinforce it, one most forget about it, which I have come to include even my triumphs.
Not hyping up these moments, not focusing on them too stringently, because what if my subconscious, both my tormentor and liberator, comes roaring back, catching a whiff of this progress like blood in the water, and pushes me all the way back into bed, and says, "that's where you belong!" And it eventually does, but not because I summoned it purposefully.
And so there seems to be an unspoken pact, even with my family, who stayed with me during my birthday and watched as I managed to sit through a long dinner, sunset, and an entire movie— the Way We Were with Redford and Streisand—to skip the praise and lauding. (Incidentally, a book on movie just came out about the behind the scenes on set.)
There is only a whisper, like when J who addressed it head-on, noting my discomfort at the beginning of dinner as I adjusted to the social atmosphere and calibrated for my new output of 70 percent effort versus my usual 2000, and days later, an under-the-breath sincere thank you from my M, for giving our family those moments to be together without dealing with my sickness. And that is perhaps the right approach, even though it produces a fracture in time between me and the world. Will that fracture last forever?
And I still do often, belong, sadly, in bed. The dinner out the first night might not put me down, but the second might, and the third one certainly will, and I have to do what I call, radical rest. And I don’t know for how long. And everything I just touched on the outside, the people, the business ideas, the cold blue water, has to wait, as I go back into the cave again, where I chide myself and promise to resume rigorous practice, because in those moments my healing is all dependent on how much I’ve practiced.
And there are some things I can do reliably well in the cave. At times, when I feel anxiety I can ground myself by simply wrapping my toes in my blanket or feeling the sheet beneath me, or doing box breaths. The other night, a thunder storm boomed and woke me right up in the middle of the night, but I fell back asleep after only a few quickened heart beats. Relative to the anxious state I lived in for practically an entire year, this is nothing short of miraculous.
As I am resting, I think about bear analogies. Will I ever leave the cave? Do I have to just hibernate or utterly transform, with different urges, different masters, different thoughts and desires? In the words of Emily Dickinson:
My loss, by sickness — Was it Loss?
Or that Ethereal Gain
One earns by measuring the Grave —
Then — measuring the Sun —
At times I can see the bear in a different light now too. That the person I become at the end of this is the real bear, the real free spirit, free from the obsessions, and pressures that used to haunt me, trained out of me through repetition, as though by cuffs on my jaw, a Clockwork Orange of healing.
As I figure this out, I continue to document these Away Messages. Even if the words about my journey sometimes aggravate my symptoms before mollifying them — like treating a clogged pore of a brain, like popping an exquisite pimple — there is much to share, so much to share. And it brings me back to my dedication and practice.
I have in mind some Toto’s Take (science-y posts) on breathing practices to improve HRV or a hefty mold detox as prescribed by my meticulous functional doctor, or Enter Labels (musings) for a Healingvrse Manifesto, or more of Dorothy’s basket (things I’m inspired or distracted by like discovering James Joyce’s incredibly dirty telegrams) and Tin Man’s Books and Records, my extraction of healing advice from artists. Maybe I will do one from a book on hospitality I just bought inspired by Hulu’s The Bear.
And while I share, I have to learn how to do it without activating my sympathetic system which I can assure you I have done with this post a hundred times over. But I’ll never be able to truly write all that I want to if I can’t figure this out.
And the journey gains purpose. I encounter more new people, some who have joined here recently after the post on visits with a functional neurologist (hello, and hi!) or through
a writer who supported the Healingvrse (thank you!), and her guest post on Away Messages below:
and
, a “fellow openminded sceptic”, with a shout out to Away Messages in a post on Chakra Meditation:
and the regular support of Dr T, a PHD running scientific self-experiments for healing on Twitter, with thousands of people (like Vitaly Buterin) supporting her search for answers through her protocol, Remission Biome (please read about it here and share if you or anyone you know has ME/CFS, or Long Covid especially).
And a few other interesting things up the sleeve. So…
To all us bears in the Healingvrse, morphing and changing hides, but always staying true, wild and indomitable beings, here is to to the next round of modifications, and while perhaps we find we still require a longer hibernation, our time is not wasted, there will once again be a reign of fearlessness, and hunting in the wild, it’s just that the prey may be different….
With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca
I'm wondering how to put what I appreciated about this piece - (which is beautifully written) - I think that if is unusually honest - and about the unfinished and provisional nature of life and health, and that it somehow includes a kind of hope that doesn't rely on 'progress' or 'happy endings'. Anyway, thank you.
Aagh, the 2 steps forward and 1 back, the getting excited with what you can do then neglecting the steps that got you there and backsliding, I know it all too well. Thanks for the shout-out, and stay strong fellow bear!