It’s so interesting for me to go back to San Francisco.
As you may remember, I spent a few weeks in SF back in June, following a good friend’s wedding in Napa Valley.
I actually just wrapped up another trip out there. I spent most of September in SF, staying with a friend and trying to investigate whether I’d eventually want to move there for work and/or grad school.
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The city of San Francisco is symbolic for me, for a number of reasons.
Back in 2005, one of my friends from high school (CA) and I had planned to travel to the Bay Area and visit our friend Karen, who was attending Stanford University at the time.
Our trip was actually planned for the same time of year– September.
However, I’d just had my surgery for compartment syndrome that spring, and at the last minute, I freaked out and canceled my plane ticket. After all I’d heard about San Francisco’s hills, I just didn’t think my legs were ready, and I didn’t want to take a chance. So CA flew out by herself, and I stayed behind to mend.
I was 19 at the time, and although I didn’t know it yet, I actually had somewhat of a long road ahead of me. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I didn’t travel at all in the first half of my 20’s, and it was only in the second half that I started to ease back into it with local trips, such as camping in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
As most of you probably know, I developed my problems with central sensitization (CS) around that same time, shortly after my leg surgery. I definitely don’t think the surgery caused the CS, but as something that the body perceives as a “trauma,” it may have been one of the precipitating events.
I’ll talk more about why I developed CS in the future, but for now, what I want you to know is that for the next five years, I didn’t travel at all. The second five years, I got back into it slowly, but only local trips, and not by myself.
So now, at 31, after everything I’ve been through: compartment syndrome surgery, discovering pain neurophysiology education, struggling to heal my sacroiliac joints…. it feels almost like I’m living in a dream world. To be able to travel to San Francisco and walk around to my heart’s content– it’s like I was transported to a parallel universe.
Here was the moment when it really hit me, how far I’d come:
I was walking from my friend’s house to the gym, and I ended up walking up some really huge hills. Like, gigantic hills– the kind you think of, when you think San Francisco.
And I was just doing it. I wasn’t sightseeing– I hadn’t set out to “walk the hills.” I was just trying to get from one place to another, like anyone. Like a local.
And it was okay.
I mean, if anything, I got a little bit of a wake-up call about maybe needing to do more cardio. But after all the years I’ve spent only being able to work out in a pool, it was such an amazing feeling to be moving through the world, as fast as I wanted, feeling my heart pumping. I was free.
It was a feeling I’d forgotten– to truly push my cardiovascular system to its limits with each footstep, out in the wind, out in the sunshine. For the past few years, I only got to experience that feeling within the safe, weightless environment of the pool. While I am so grateful for my pool workouts, my trek on this day brought back a form of muscle memory. With the thud of each footstep, I was awake. I was back.
The thing is, this isn’t really meant to be a post about physical accomplishment. Instead, it’s about my unexpectedly “Returning” to an aspect of life that I was prepared to live without.
I had made peace with not being able to move the way I wanted. Not being able to travel, and more or less being stuck in place, taught me to try to always notice the beautiful little things around me. I’m not saying I succeeded all the time, but it was a skill that I worked at, and I got better at it.
I had to learn to savor the little things– the colors of the leaves in fall, the glitter of sunlight filtering through the trees, the taste of really good coffee– because it was the only way to make up for the things I’d lost.
Over time, it started to come more naturally. Maybe I was just getting into a better place in my life, emotionally. Maybe I was just growing up. Or maybe it was all of these factors.
But the point is, it happened. I learned to live without running, without traveling, without feeling free in a geographical sense, because I realized there were more important ways to feel free.
Now that that kind of freedom has come back to me, it’s like an unexpected bonus. And I view it gratefully.
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