The push & pull of when to keep going, and when to rest

Yesterday I was trying to drive home in rush hour traffic, along a route I wasn’t familiar with, and I ended up taking one wrong turn after another.

For those that know Boston, I was trying to get on Storrow Drive West, but somehow ended up going up Route 1 North, over the Tobin Bridge.

I took an exit and tried to turn around, only to find I kept making more wrong turns.  I thought I was going up a ramp to get back to Route 1, only to realize I was driving on something I wasn’t quite sure was a road.  (By the way, normally I’m a very good driver, it was just a weird area!).

And then, the next thing I know, I ended up in Chelsea, driving up this beautiful hill towards a residential area, and I look out and see this as my view:

For some reason, it got me thinking of all the twists and turns in my journey.

All the times I’ve been mad at myself for trying too hard (like starving myself and running a billion miles a week cause I was afraid I was going to get fat).

And all the times when, looking back, I was afraid to try too hard and so gave up too soon.

***

Honestly, what I think now is that you just never know what lies ahead. And blaming yourself and giving up are, in a way, just our attempts to try to have control over a difficult situation.

The older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve learned, the more counter-productive I’ve seen that self-blame can be.

I‎t just isn’t useful; it doesn’t prove a point; it doesn’t get us any closer to the answers.

The truth is that there are answers I’ve found through hard work, and there are answers I only found because I happened to stumble upon them.

The one thing I wish I could really change, though, is all the times I held back because I was afraid of looking too hard. As if giving in and admitting I truly had a problem was the same as giving in to it, when actually that’s what it was going to take for me to overcome it.

Sometimes the right path will look like the wrong one, or the one that couldn’t possibly work (like me driving on a road I wasn’t quite sure was a road).

You just have to keep going and have enough faith in yourself to know that, ultimately, you’ll figure it out if something is or isn’t right for you.

***

Someone asked me the other day how I found my physical therapist Paula– the person who finally really helped me with the SI joint.

The answer is simple, but also complex.

Technically, I found her because I happened to do a Google search for “physical therapy sacroiliac joint” and the name of my hometown (where I was living at the time). The website for the practice she worked at popped up, with her online staff bio, where it listed the SI joint as one of clinical interests. Simple, right?

But there are so many more layers to this. Such as the fact that she’d been working there for over five years, and somehow never came up in any of my millions of Google searches. (I’m still not sure how this happened, if someone redesigned their website at just the right time, or what).

I’d looked and looked and thought I knew of everyone in our area, but somehow, I’d missed her.

***

I wasn’t going to look at all, actually.  I’d already seen FOUR other physical therapists, all of whom had either failed to help me, or made things worse.  I felt done.

It was my ex-boyfriend Tim who convinced me to look again.   He pointed out that maybe this was just what it took for me to find answers.  He got me to see that maybe four physical therapists wasn’t really that many.   Not if my entire life was on hold.

He told me about one of his friends, who, for years, suffered from constant sinus infections.  This friend saw multiple doctors who said there was nothing they could do, yet he refused to take no for an answer and kept seeking out other opinions.  Finally, he saw a specialist who told him that by luck of the draw, he’d been born with nasal passages that were too narrow.  This doctor was able to fix the problem with minor surgery.

So there are no hard and fast rules here. There’s no way to guarantee an easy answer.

The only guarantee is that if you waste time judging yourself, or being afraid to admit that you really have a problem, or assuming that no one will be able to help you… you’ll be more likely to push away your chances to find answers.

I finally found Paula through luck, probably because my search engine results changed.

But I also only found her because I had someone who cared about me to tell me I was judging myself and my situation too harshly; that I was jumping to conclusions about not being able to find help.

***

This started off as a post about finding answers, but in a way this post has turned into somewhat of a thank-you to Tim, as well.

So thank you, Tim. (We’re still friends and I’ll be sending him the link to this after I hit publish).

I hope you all are able to believe in yourselves and keep fighting.

And I hope you also, in one way or another, have a Tim.