Learning it Over Again

I seem to be the sort of person who needs to learn things over and over again. Once is far from sufficient. And it’s not that I learn them better each time. It’s that I must learn them anew.

This time around, I am learning once again that exercise is not helpful for my condition. In fact, it makes things much worse.

Not so very long ago, having decided that 1) I need to lose weight and 2) exercise might strengthen and thus fortify and somehow “cure” the painful parts of my body, I learned that the actual case was the exact opposite. What I learned, not so very long ago, was the same thing I had learned through previous such conceits on previous occasions: Exercise exacerbates and enlarges the already existing pain.

I found, just as I had found on each previous occasion, that this is not a “normal” sort of pain caused by stress of the muscles—a healthy sort of strengthening accompanied by the aches that are typical when practicing under-used muscles. No, it is simply a sharpening, a heightening of the weird neuropathic pain that has set up permanent residence in my neck, shoulder and back.

So here I am once again, convalescing, having lost significant ground on the road to greater comfort through my own unwise interventions. Déjà vu.

Of course, it is quite natural to want to take some step or steps to address a problem. We’ve done this sort of thing all our lives long. The most typical thing about problems was that they always came with solutions. What is unnatural is when they don’t. This is something we do not want to face. We are driven to “deal with” the problem, to correct it, to eradicate it, to return to being ourselves. The hardest thing is to acknowledge that, sometimes, there is no road back to the way we were before.