The Beauty of Intentional Healing (Written in Extended Metaphor)
Originally written May 2014.
photo by toa heftiba şinca
Many people have expressed concern for me after I sustained a severe injury last year. (Too much concern sometimes, but this was my first severe injury of its type in life, so I am not entirely certain what’s standard.)
The injury left me with some very strange side effects, in which I was frequently disoriented, but also given to periods of having to swallow fire that bubbled up my throat, and burning my hands because thunderbolts would manifest and I didn’t know what to do with them.
Bizarrely to me, the advice I was given from some folks was that to make myself feel better, I should find individuals who matched the physical make up of the person who I felt had generated those symptoms and empty my arsenal on them. This would magically simultaneously cure me while rendering this new person entirely and completely unharmed. I was to repeat this process until I felt better, or until I stumbled upon a person whose love and care for me unlocked my healing and saved me from my ailments.
I had a nagging feeling that this wasn’t true, so I kept looking for different remedies.
Thankfully, I found really awesome Physician. Their specialty is healing spiritual, emotional, and mental wounds—They’re number one in Their field, in fact. Their strong recommendation was to put me in patient isolation from folks that I might accidentally or intentionally injure while I underwent observation and assessment.
It’s unbelievably but wonderfully important to Them that we all take care of one other as well as ourselves, so They’ve been working diligently with me on my own healing, including on learning to reduce spreading damage to others who might be susceptible. I’ve gotten to sit with some carefully chosen professionals who are equipped to let me spit fire and hurl thunderbolts all day long, but also reminded me constantly that, as much as it hurt, my aim in getting it out is sort through it.
It turned out, as we sorted through the shards and mess*, that this was the manifestation of years of various injuries I had never really noticed but had suddenly overwhelmed me. I needed to learn in my recovery time how to better avoid situations where I would trigger or reinjure them.
After months (years) of sorting, I was mostly vomiting rainbows, and that just feels better. If we’re going to vomit, make it a rainbow. Throw it up into the sky. A couple of thunderbolts do still pop up every now and then—that’s just a matter of being human, and we’re just going to keep working on practices for how to defuse those as necessary.
I was warned and have noticed that lightning bolts still escape at times, and sometimes I experience seemingly random aches and pains as parts of me enters different stage of healing. Apparently that’s part of the process. And with continued healing work over our life, it eventually should fade. Mostly.
I was released back onto a regular ward a couple of months ago, and by regular hospital standards am free to be discharged soon. But my Physician and I have decided that I’m going to maintain my previous isolation parameters for the time being. I’ve noticed in the general ward that a lot of the same people actually keep coming back through here, and each time they look more and more confused, or angrier, or more bitter, or sadder, or incredibly disillusioned.
In talking about how we can all better avoid that, the Physician posited that we too often aren’t giving ourselves genuine time, rest, and recovery after we discharge to finish healing. And when we don’t fully take time to fully understand our new points of growth and limitations, we’re reinjure ourselves, and even cause harm in other ways.
My outpatient treatment plan is fully focused on self-discovery, lots of fun that doesn’t involve using others (it turns out there are lots of these things!), oh—and remembering that for the majority of my life prior to this injury I was perfectly happy, so it’s more than possible to achieve that again.
Even better, my Physician—who requires no healthcare plan—is doing a wonderful job in support care, and has been helping me discover and reconnect with people already in my life who have always had my back, and are more than willing to help me complete a full recovery in healthy, holistic ways.
They made it very clear that I will never be 100% because, well, none of us are. Perfection isn’t really the point—learning to live well is.
They promised that we get to learn how to recognize when people getting close to me are masking their own injuries; how I can support them without getting injured in their process; or when I may need to move away from them because I am not in a place to help them. In my healing, I get to learn how to help one another do the same.
Intentional healing means we keep learning to love ourselves and one another well. It isn’t easy, but it’s awesome.
Isn’t greater love what we truly desire in the first place?
_______
*I want to give a shout out to the Custodian from my isolation ward, because that was a seriously nasty mess. They insist that They take pride in Their job of helping people clean up what’s ailing them, because the point is that we’re better, and becoming well again.
Also, They looked a little like the Physician. I wonder if they’re related…