Throwdown: Acceptance vs. Hope

Tuesday, September 15, 2024

Ahh, the massive interrobang of hope. The working title of this post has been “Fuck Hope” for quite some time, but I’m trying to be less sweary. Hope is supposed to be positive, something you turn to in moments of darkness and despair to get you through, but I  have often found the very idea of it to be torturous, painful, infuriating, and more than a little dark. I have hated the very thought of it, cursed it, believed that I had to snuff out any flicker of it in order to save my mental health, and abandoned it in an attempt to save myself. 

I recently paid for an MRI so that I would have concrete proof that there was nothing else that could possibly be done for my seven year old shoulder pain, other than learning to live in my current reality and practice acceptance, but the MRI proved the opposite. Fuck. 

Living in chronic pain is a real exercise in mental spiralling; up, down, and all around, clockwise and counter, sometimes simultaneously. I have often wanted to write pieces that were encouraging and might inspire other people going through this never to give up on themselves, but the reality is that sometimes you do have to give up in order to function. For seven years I have had massage, physio, traction, needling, cupping, epidurals, PRP, cortisone injections, nerve blocks, not to mention a multitude of medications, psychologists, social workers, vision therapy, occupational therapy; I’ve read books on mindfulness, phantom pain, radical acceptance, self-compassion, and on andonandonandonandonandon… So after being told there was nothing more they could do for me, I decided that enough was enough, and it was time to do some Pain Reprocessing Therapy. Basically, try and remind my brain that there’s no physical reason for the pain so that it would stop sending pain signals. 

Except that they have found a physical reason for the pain. Now I have this strange rage that there is hope for improvement. Why did I have to wait for seven years and choose to pay for an MRI that the doctors were certain would show nothing?! After years of clinging to hope, and then finally accepting that this is just my life now, I have hope again, and it’s really throwing me for a loop. Shouldn’t this be a good thing? I might be able to have surgery, and this surgery might get rid of the pain that has become my constant, unwelcome companion. The chronic pain might even be contributing to my ongoing post concussion stuff. This is a good thing. So why doesn’t it feel like it?! I’ll say it again, FUCK!

I went back to work part-time a year ago today, after having been off for two years. The amount of pain I was in three years ago when I went off work was brutal and unrelenting, not to mention the ongoing concussion symptoms. I had hoped to be off short term, maybe three months max, get some PRP in my shoulder and neck, do some vision therapy to help the old brain, and be good to go. Not so. Two full years later I was only cleared to go back part time. The psychological toll that it took on me to not be able to work was… disconcerting. I felt like a failure, like I was a defective ass for not being able to live my so-called normal life. No matter how consistently I did my physio, this pain in my right shoulder would not go away. I tried pushing through it, since being gentle wasn’t working. I tried ignoring it, thinking that if I just disregarded it my brain would forget about it. I told it to go away, it wasn’t welcome or useful. I went through a period of time where I thought the only reason it wasn’t getting better was because I was a bad person. I’m telling you, being in long term pain can make the most illogical things seem like the gospel truth. 

I thought I was going to  go crazy. I was seeing a psychologist once a week to help me cope with being off work and the effect that not being able to teach was having on my mental health. I was diagnosed as a workaholic, surprise surprise. No amount of exploring the psychological effects of pain helped. Then I found out that my doctor would only clear me to go back to work part-time, which I refused to accept for a long time. My restrictions were mainly due to the concussion stuff, because the pain was the second worst element of all of this, but I digress. I do have a point. 

I have been back at work for one year, part time, determined to do more than that. There’s no way I can, despite the financial strain that working part time is causing in my life. The stress of accepting the fact that this is just my life now… the only way to accept that was to give up hope that I could just try harder, be better, do better, GET better. And now, I have some hope. It’s not the happy thing that it should be. 

I feel like I have been turned inside out, scraped and sandpapered, and turned right side in again. I look the same, I sound the same, people are happy to see me, but I am raw. I feel like a part of me died, the part that has been able to work through some terrible events in my life, compartmentalise and get things done no matter the cost.

I have been undone. This hope that I now have is making me wonder if it’s even in my best interest to be in less pain, if that means that I am going to revert back to workaholism. When I was able to push myself to  get things done regardless of the pain, it was at the expense of my mental health. I refused to alter my level of functioning, even when I was in 8/10 pain constantly and my brain was screaming at me to just kill myself. I don’t want to go back to that. 

Obviously I am happy that they have found a possible surgical fix for my shoulder, but suddenly feeling hope again has been really complex, especially for an expert overthinker. 

I am reminded that the emotional journey of being injured, being in pain, and trying to get better is one that I share with many. It is isolating, and although I tried to have empathy for people I knew going through it, I now realise that like most things, there’s no way to understand it until it hits you. 

 The emotional labour of working through all of the ups and downs is heavy, and many people do not have access to the psychological support I had. I still see a psychologist, but not primarily for the pain journey. It has changed me, and I didn’t even realise it because I was so determined to beat it. So this hope is making me angry. It feels like it can’t coexist with acceptance. I couldn’t accept what was happening to my life as long as there was any kind of hope, so the denial was very strong; denial that any of this was affecting me and that I might have to do less. My plan was to think positive and have unrelenting hope. Ay, there’s the rub. 

Hope feels wrapped up in toxic positivity, because we’re told to have hope even when it makes no sense to do so, lest we appear negative. My ex told me that the bad things that happened to our child were because I was such a terrible person that I attracted negative energy from the universe. How did I believe and internalise such BS? I carried that for twenty years, and it took this level of injury and counselling for me to be able to even think about putting it down. It still rears its head, but I am able to talk about it now. Write about it. Share it in the hopes that others going through a similar time might feel less alone, because I have never felt as isolated as I felt when I was at home trying to get better. 

This level of overthinking and ruminating about the journey of the past seven years is just a glimpse into what it is like to have your life changed by an injury and resulting chronic pain. Whatever happens, I have been forever altered by this experience, and I HOPE that having hope for less pain doesn’t undo the self-acceptance and self-compassion that I have found along the way. My surgical consult happens tomorrow, and I hope that I can accept whatever the next step in this journey is without the twisty spikes of a spiral.