(I posted this earlier today and then began thinking about several hikes I’ve done this summer. I’ve had to be mindful about not putting myself in a position to fail due to my knees. It got me to thinking about the metaphor of climbing mountains toward our dreams/goals. We can’t expect to be in a position to succeed getting to the top when we’ve got a limp we haven’t dealt with. Maybe something to think about as you read this.)
My last day as a probation officer was yesterday. I resigned once before only to return two years later… but damn it, this time I mean it! I quit!
As my final week began last Monday, I began the process of slowly clearing out my office. I had about 20 different 8×10 pictures with (in my mind) thought-provoking statements or questions meant to just sit there quietly on the wall until a client noticed one and wanted to talk about how a particular picture/message resonated with them on a given day. As I began taking them off the wall, each picture seemed to have its moment with me because as much as I can say I put those pictures up for my clients, I also put them up for me. I too needed to be reminded daily that I’m after something in this life, and to get where I want to go, I must address my own crap.
With my new job, I’ll have a home office so my wife already made it clear there was no way all those pictures were going up on the spare bedroom wall where I’ll make my office, so I started taking pictures down with no real plan for what I’m doing with any of them… but I know I’m not throwing them away. As I gathered the pictures in a stack to take out to my truck, one stood out, and here at the end of the week, the message is still on my mind. It’s a simple message with no picture as background because the words were the focus…
“Limp long enough and it begins to feel normal.”
It would be easy to apply this statement to my client’s lives because for so many of them, the trauma of their lives, whether self-inflicted or not, is obvious. It’s easy to see the damage along the path they have traveled, how they’ve made choices which compromised their ability to be successful and how they’ve made choices which have harmed the lives of those close to them as well as strangers who didn’t know them prior to the crime committed. But I’ve always maintained that my clients and I shared more in common along our journey.
Sure, there are significant details we do not have in common. I’m not struggling to overcome a lengthy criminal history to gain a decent job or respectable housing, I was able to work my way through college years ago and become eligible for better opportunities, I wasn’t raised by extended family (or in foster care) because a parent wasn’t in the picture for whatever reason… those are all huge events unique to some (or many) of my clients… and yet, I’ve still looked to unhealthy outlets to cope with experiences I would have avoided if I had the choice. I look back on a childhood questioning what was real, I look back down the trail I’ve traveled all these years and wonder if I really had to learn some of the hard lessons I experienced or could they have been avoided.
Bottom line here… I question where I’ve failed to “heal” and simply learned to compensate by limping along until I no longer realized I was limping?
This message has much in common with other messages I’m likely to be writing about in this blog soon, so I want to be careful and remain focused here. This post should be short… my point is to convey the message that we should always question what we have embraced as “normal”. So I’ll share what was a powerful illustration to me and then probably end this post.
LIFE LESSONS FROM MY PHYSICAL THERAPIST
Perhaps the lesson of living with a normalized limp can be summed up in the most obvious way by sharing the lesson I learned from my physical therapist about 9 years ago. In October 2015 I chose to try a stem-cell replacement procedure in efforts to avoid knee-replacement surgery. I am well-aware that the time for such a surgery is coming sooner than later, but back in 2015, while in my early to mid-50’s, I wasn’t at all open to the idea of having a part of my body permanently cut out, even if my knee was bone-on-bone. So, I went through the stem-cell procedure and then booked an appointment with a therapist to begin some rehab.
What I learned in that first appointment was a powerful life lesson. My fundamentals for the basic movement of walking had become warped over time because I had learned to compensate for the pain and weakness of two knees getting progressively worse. I was unaware of my poor form because the process happened slowly over the years. To geek-out on P.T. talk for a moment, rather than using my hamstrings and place appropriate work on my hips, my quads had learned to fire off inappropriately placing more pressure on my knee joints. The therapist patiently worked with me as I had to relearn the basic movements required to fire my hamstrings and take the pressure off my knee joints… and this was just for walking… like to the refrigerator… from the parking lot to my office… just basic everyday movement.
This of course led me to begin pondering how this very act plays out in our minds around trauma… around negative thinking patterns we can possess… around accepting things around us as “normal” when they are anything but normal. We gradually learn to compensate in inappropriate ways leading to normalized behavior or thinking patterns that are ineffective at the least, and destructive at worse.
How do you learn to question something when it seems so normal? I can’t answer that for you, but for me, I have spent a lot of time considering the decisions I make, the way I think about things; why do I do what I do; why do I want the things I think I want; what am I doing that is ritual as opposed to having real meaning. It could appear overwhelming to a person to read this and wonder why I put myself through a process like this… but it really is as simple as turning down the noise and tuning out distractions. Silence is a powerful ally if we will simply learn to embrace it.
I think I want to be done with this point. There are places I want to go in this blog, and as I experience the immediate weight lifted from my shoulders from leaving my job as a P.O., I’m feeling it may be time to start putting more thoughts on “paper” and make some progress here.