Returning to old lessons

and finding new meaning

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

This past month, I’ve returned to an old pattern of being sick on repeat. One illness trailed into the other. My first reaction to the dawning of an old pattern has been frustration. I thought I was past this.

A related old pattern has resurfaced since I added heavy weights to my workout routine—a byproduct of a perimenopause diagnosis and a resulting podcast binge. At first, this seemed like a good development. I felt satisfied and spent by workouts in a new way, and the only downside seemed to be sudden cravings for sliced turkey that defy my aspiring-vegetarian sensibilities. But I’ve recently started to notice something else—a creeping level of fixation on results. I thought I was past this too.

I used to treat my body like a punching bag. “Running through the pain” in cross country cost me seven stress fractures and a neuroma that lasted years. And I spent a nearly a third of high school out sick, including months of mono-driven bedrest during spring semester senior year. During those months spent flat on my back listening to tape-recorded classes and missing everything from prom to senior yearbook signing, I learned some of the most important lessons of my life about doing the opposite of listening to my body and punishing it instead. Gradually, I changed the way I treated myself, and the injuries and illnesses subsided.

Now they’ve crept back; I feel out of control, and that makes me angry. But the most vicious part of my last few weeks hasn’t been grappling with the return of twenty-year-old programming: It’s been telling myself I should know better. Adding self-insult to injury.

I’m believing more these days that however many rotations around the sun I get, I’m here to learn (and relearn) a few things. We circle back not because we’re lost, but because each return reveals something new. So what if I waited patiently for old problems to come back around, and when they did, laughed a little? What if I sprinkled kindness on old wounds? In their own ways—sometimes quiet and sometimes loud—my aches and pains keep on drawing my attention inside instead of outside, toward internal meaning instead of what people think. Which is a really good thing, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

I make a list of every optional plan and meeting I have in the next two weeks and start cancelling them; and I forgo the desk to curl up in my bed for the day’s work with a hot pack and the cat on my lap. Okay body, I tell myself. This time I’ll try not to punish you for the lesson.