Hello, readers of my blog. I understand it has been quite some time since I’ve written an entry, but finding motivation to face my feelings and thoughts any more than I already have been has been difficult. With my second surgery, longer recovery time, and keeping busy with other facets of my life, finding the time to sit down and write has been hard. But tonight, I want to share something with you all that has been floating in my head for the past couple days. Tonight’s blog topic, as you can probably tell from the title, is acceptance.
Words can only do so much in describing what I’ve felt since day one of my injury. Anger. Confusion. Pain. Knowing that my life won’t be the same for a long, long time. Wishing I was just dreaming, wondering if there is any possible way that that day could have ended up differently. Doubting my skills as an athlete and wondering “How could my body fail me like that?”. As the days, and weeks, and now month has gone on, anger and frustration that this is my situation still remains. I find myself asking “why me” more than I ever have in my life. The more research I do on my injury, the more devastated I am that this happened to me. Full recovery times are upwards of a year, with physical therapy, strengthening, and just waiting for your own body to heal itself up.
If you have had a major injury or chronic problem in your life, you know how easy it is to get lost in yourself and mull over it for hours upon hours. Its hard not to constantly think about an injury when it is physically taking up all of my body’s effort to heal, and making itself known when I have to do a task as simple as getting up to piss first thing in the morning. Those 6-7 hours I get a night are the only times I feel I can truly escape the cage that is my body.
All of these emotions are valid. I am giving myself the time, energy, and space to feel them all out. With starting physical therapy I am accompanying it with getting back into weightlifting, which has already done wonders for my mental health and processing these difficult, defeating thoughts. With this time to process, I got to thinking:
What if my knee injury was the best thing to happen to me?
Trust me, I am just as confused as you are. But in light of all the hardship I have physically and mentally faced so far, I am trying to let my knee injury teach me some lessons and accepting this as something that I have absolutely no choice but to go through. Why waste my time during this process? Sit around and mope all day? It was about time my life got a little bit harder. This is the hardest thing I have been through in my life, and the number one thing that I can learn from saying that is gratitude. If I can say the worst thing I’ve been through so far has been shattering my patella in half in a freak snowboarding accident, I’d say I am living a life filled with fun, friends, energy, and excitement.
Another thing that I am letting this injury teach me is patience. The recovery process for my injury is one year. One year. One year of hard work in physical therapy, one year in trusting the process, one year in getting over the mental block that is fear of re-injury (which, you aren’t truly healed until you conquer this fear). All my life I wanted to grow up fast, to get to the next step now, to make progress as fast as I can. This injury has shown me how to dial it back a little bit; how to sit with myself, trust that change will come while putting in the hard work, and take everything one day at a time. Because when you feel physically trapped in your own body, the only thing you can do is take everything one day at a time.
My knee injury has shown me what I truly want out of life and myself. It has given me ample opportunity to sit and ponder about where I want to find myself after this all ends. Why not use this time to make those dreams a reality? With saying my injury could be the best thing that ever happened to me, I am envisioning and working towards a complete physical and mental transformation of myself. I now place physical health and fitness as a top priority and feel truly motivated to be more athletic, something I struggled to find motivation for before this injury. You really don’t know what you have or want until its gone, and in my case, I finally have found that drive to want to max out my athletic capabilities with weightlifting, skating and snowboarding when I can, kendama, and overall wellness of my body. This doesn’t help me just physically, but mentally as well. With these goals in mind, I know I can conquer the recovery for this injury and come out the other side a better, stronger man.
Thank you.
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