Hi readers,
The last few days I’ve had a back spasm. This is the very scenario I spend a lot of time trying to avoid with my various self-care practices, especially JournalSpeak and meditation, a scenario that nonetheless occurs sometimes. I’ve had back pain since I was twelve. Since doing the aforementioned mind-body medicine work, I’ve actually come to accept that this is just how I am — and it’s not necessarily a bad thing either. I nowadays view my back pain more as a messenger, one reminding me, however forcefully, that I sometimes need to slow down, do less. Especially during times of heightened stress, as is certainly true in the world right now, and is also true of my own life.
Pain sucks; back pain sucks. All this understanding I have of this sort of pain these days, all this information I’ve learned, what does it matter when the pain’s got me? When every position in which I might sit or recline hurts? When standing hurts too? When I’m carefully calculating, should I attempt to lift that? Should I hazard doing another sink of dishes?
I have sometimes used the metaphor of tornado watch / tornado warning to talk about my back pain, as if my back’s the Great Plains, with a propensity for such events. Sometimes when stress is high, and I sense that conditions are right, tornado watch I’ll tell those around me.
Sometimes, as happened this weekend, the spasm will overtake. Tornado warning. The pain will be medium to high to sometimes very high. Sometimes I’ll be totally immobilized, my neck rotation gone, my arm strength zapped.
The pain is a message, I try to tell myself. A rude messenger, yes, but nonetheless. I try to listen, which means I actually slow the fuck down. Do less. Ask for help. I’m sorta terrible at chilling out, is a truth of me. If I’m resting, even for a supposedly “valid” reason such as this, my head has a tendency to eat at me, to bully me for laziness. So I try to check this habit too, part of my broader attempt to shift my tendency to self-bully for, well, anything.
I try to not churn in fear and a catastrophe-type mindset about the pain itself. I commit to daily JournalSpeak and meditation. I soak in hot water. I smoke indicas. I do the gentlest conceivable yin yogas. When I am doing the mindfulness practices especially, I try to really feel into whatever I might be avoiding feeling. I try to let it out. Cry, feel anger, whatever. Or I try to breathe into that space that’s calling my attention. I try to listen to it. I imagine breathing the pain away. Sometimes these things help, even for a few minutes. I try to notice if the pain recedes even slightly, or if my attention is called even for a few minutes to something else. The spasm I have right now is my classic one — upper middle back, the pain sometimes radiating down an arm or up my neck. Sometimes instead I’ll get pain in my lower back instead, or a hip. Sometimes I struggle acutely with panic attacks or insomnia or other manifestations of embodied stress.
When a symptom overtakes these days, it’s hard to not feel like it’s my own failing, given how supposedly committed I am to all this journaling and crap. But, again, I try to use the event of the back spasm or whatever itself as an opportunity to practice a new tact. As JournalSpeak creator Nicole Sachs often repeats in her discussion of these topics, one of the most important facets of doing this work, other than literally doing the work — like cultivating a JournalSpeak practice — is having patience and kindness towards ourselves. I’m a huge perfectionist. Many who find her work transformational are similar. Perfectionist. Hardworking, perhaps to a fault. Extremely hard on ourselves.
As an example I recently noticed I made a small error in the last installment of this very newsletter: I referred to a maroon-colored bush in the meadow across from my house as a forsythia. Afterwards a friend who was over happened to point out the bush, calling it a dogwood. They know way more than I do about plants. I felt my insides sink, with the realization I had erred in front of you all.
“That’s a dogwood?” I asked, though not explaining why I was double checking this, and they said yes. Inside I felt shame overtaking, descending into self-abuse about my stupidity.
But I try to catch this, too, this tendency to leap to self-bullying when I actually mess something up. Because the truth is the things I mess up are, like this bush, usually not that big a deal. So I mixed up one plant for another, who cares? So what, if a few of you also noticed that error, if any of you even did? Will you think everything I have to say useless therefore? I doubt it. If I actually fact check these emotions, they don’t tend to make sense.
I did spend way too much time debating what to do about this dogwood/forsythia problem. I thought about putting a correction in the last newsletter. Then I thought about leaving it messy to make a point. I resolved to just tell you about the error and to discuss all of this. Maybe because it’s a way of mildly trolling my bullying head, which would rather pretend I’m perfect, I guess. Infallible, without regrets. Which of course would all be lies. And every time I publish anything, however low stakes (like this), however higher, I risk messing up. Trying anything invites failure, I remind myself.
So much about my life — these last few years especially — hasn’t gone as I would have expected or planned or hoped. The extent to which that’s true will become clearer in this next book I’m writing. I sometimes imagine my internal perfectionist struggling to keep up with all that’s transpired, how overwhelmed they must feel, totally burned out. I’ve found there’s something about everything going the opposite as you’d have wanted that can be very freeing. If nothing else, it’s an occasion for learning.
I love learning is another truth. I especially like learning fun stuff like the difference between a dogwood and a forsythia.
The dogwood’s since lost all its leaves for the winter. This, for the record, is a forsythia:
Take care,
Sandy
p.s. I’ll be back soon with a second installment of my advice-ish column. To submit a question about mental health or gender o whatever else for a future installment, please write whatselpingtoday@gmail.com.
p.p.s. What’s Helping Today: Andrew Leland’s book. If you want to learn more about it, I liked this conversation about it on PJ Vogt’s podcast, which btw is good!