So yesterday I was going along through my over-scheduled life, when I carried a bag of prescription cat food across the vet’s parking lot. Focused on opening my car trunk, I failed to notice the curb and a second later I was falling, my knee banged into said curb, and I landed unceremoniously on the ground, panting through the incredible pain.

Glenn was by my side in a moment, worried and eager to help. After we maneuvered me into the car, I quickly embraced denial as a strategy. Glenn quite reasonably wanted to take me home for ice and elevation of my leg, while I preferred to pretend it was nothing and continue on with our plans to meet my parents for dinner. I figured that my pants weren’t ripped, so it couldn’t be that bad, once the initial blast of pain had dulled.

I have written previously about the upside of denial, and I stand by my conclusion that facing some medical diagnoses or procedures with some degree of denial rather than full, conscious awareness of all their horrific elements, can be a functional approach to facilitating adjustment and coping.

But this is not that type of story. This one illustrates the down side of denial.

I got my way, we had a lovely dinner, and by the time we got home, my knee was so swollen and painful that Glenn had to support me every step of the way to our bedroom. And today I had to cancel all meetings and classes for the entire day to keep my banged up knee iced and elevated while I gulped anti-inflammatories.

I admitted sheepishly this morning that denial is my preferred strategy in the face of all medical drama, and Glenn said dryly, “Yeah, I know. I’ve learned a few things about you over the years. I tried to get you to go home, but you were being you, so…” He shrugged.

Denial is almost always my first-line coping strategy. I can’t say for sure whether skipping dinner in favor of immediate icing would have left my knee in better shape today than it is, but it is quite likely that it would have helped.

This time denial was not a functional phase of coping; instead, it was a step toward making my knee worse.

Yet I admit that in the same circumstances, I would almost certainly make the same choice again. With all of my extensive formal education, it is reasonable to ask how I can be so very dumb. Why do I embrace denial in circumstances where it makes the situation worse?

Clinical psychologist Mary Lamia offers a helpful insight. She suggests that it may not be reality that people in denial are rejecting—in this case, the fact that my knee was clearly badly bruised and swelling—so much as we are ignoring the truth of the feelings that we have about a particular reality.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

What did I feel when I smashed my knee? Dismay at the pain, anger at having my busy routine disrupted, embarrassment at falling, fear that a serious injury to my one remaining knee would make my already complicated life as an amputee untenable.

I was, and remain, utterly uninterested in experiencing those feelings. Hence the denial. Do I know better? Sure. But when those emotions wash over me, I just want them to go away as quickly as possible.

As I sit on my couch with my knee elevated and iced, I can admit that denying “all the feels,” as my students say, is ultimately a bad idea. As long as I deny them, I can’t process and release them.

And unlike the swelling in my knee, no amount of ibuprofen—or any other substance—will ease the swelling of painful emotions that are denied. Ouch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just finished a busy, productive quarter teaching two classes of great students.

And as usual, faced with the dreaded end-of-quarter grading deluge, I decided to forgo mindfulness, gentle self-care, and a reasonable schedule in favor of going full-out Old Testament style in my stress—gnashing of teeth, rending of garments (well, okay, I put my thumb through the side seam of one aging pair of underpants), and offering of burnt sacrifices on the altar of academe (okay, it was one Trader Joe’s frozen scallion pancake burnt beyond recognition in the toaster oven).

Anyway, my grading frenzy sucked, and I had come down with a cold by the end of it. But I made it through, as I have at the end of each term I have taught since I began teaching as an M.A. student 23 years ago.

When at last I cleared away the accumulated Diet Coke cans and looked up from my grading screen (I have long since traded old school piles of papers for the speed grader rubrics in my course management software), I was exhausted. It was then that I happened to rediscover an Internet meme that I had found a while ago and forgotten:

You often feel tired, not because you have done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.

Well, yeah. Grading most definitely does not spark a light in me. It is a necessary evil rather than a satisfying part of my career as a professor.

This naturally led me to thinking about what does spark a light in me.

Cuddling my cats. Spending time with Glenn. Visiting family. Having coffee or lunch with  friends. Cooking with my mom. Making pizza and playing “death match” (Rummikub) with my BFF, niece, and nephew on Friday nights. Reading novels. Being by the ocean in Maine. Good quality chocolate. Cheering for my Red Sox. Purple t-shirts with feisty feminist sayings printed on them.

And a lot of my professional work sparks a light as well—designing course syllabi and lesson plans for a new or revised course. Reading journal articles and scholarly books, particularly those on innovative qualitative methodology (nerd alert!). Writing. Attending conferences. That feeling you have after a class session has gone really well, with students highly engaged and seeming to really grasp challenging concepts.

This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, and its odd array of items reflects my particular quirkiness. Your lists would include different things, maybe hiking or football or gardening or computer games or dog walking.

I love knowing that each of my loved ones—and all acquaintances, neighbors, and strangers—have their own unique lists of what sparks a light in each of them. It takes all kinds to make a world, and it takes the tremendous variety of what sparks each of us to make and sustain a good world.

What sparks a light in you? How can we spend more time doing sparky stuff and less time doing things that don’t spark our lights or even extinguish our sparks?

I just returned from a trip back east. For most of the four days, we enjoyed gorgeous, sunny weather, but one afternoon we had a storm.

This thunderstorm rolled rapidly across the bright blue sky, transforming the scattered, puffy, white clouds into a bank of dark gray in a few moments. The sudden decrease in atmospheric pressure (that’s the thing measured by barometers) that accompanied the storm sparked a sizable bout of phantom pain in my missing leg.

I wasn’t actually surprised; I have told a couple of pain doctors and other amputees that my phantom pain gets worse when it’s storming, and they all agreed that this weird phenomena is quite common among amputees. To my knowledge, no scientific evidence supports our claim, but anecdotal evidence abounds.

And during this thunderstorm, the anecdotal evidence was plentiful — that is, my missing limb hurt a lot. My traveling companion, one of my aunts, was compassionate and eager to help. Unfortunately, all I could do was wait it out, so I tried to distract myself by reading, answering some email, and then talking with my aunt.

A couple of hours later, my aunt asked, “How is your phantom pain? Are you feeling better?”

“No,” I stated, shrugging. “It’s still pretty bad.”

My aunt looked surprised by my response, and it occurred to me that I wasn’t acting like I was in pain. I mean, I wasn’t giving off any cues that the pain continued to be a problem.

I’m not a martyr; I often let people know I am in pain by gasping when it spikes or groaning or even crying if it gets bad enough. On the other hand, I’m also pretty used to being in pain, and I don’t always bother to express the pain on my face or body if it isn’t too bad, particularly if I’m teaching or in a meeting or giving a presentation at a conference or really enjoying a conversation with a friend. It’s not that I don’t feel the pain in these instances; it is that I don’t need to perform feeling the pain.

I think that the “rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10” is a fairly limited approach to pain assessment, but it’s all I’ve got. On a scale where 1 is a paper cut  and 10 is when (true story) the recovery room nurse shuts off your morphine drip after major orthopedic surgery because your breathing is so shallow they are afraid you will stop breathing entirely, then this phantom pain caused by the storm ranged from about a 4 to a 5. It was definitely noticeable, couldn’t nap through it, exhausting after awhile but not incapacitating, like bad menstrual cramps or walking home on a definitely-twisted-but-not-really-sprained ankle.

So the pain I felt was considerable, but at the same time, it did not necessitate an outward performance.  Not that my aunt would doubt me, but it was reasonable to assume that the pain had passed since I was sitting there without grimacing or gasping or yanking my prosthesis off to massage my leglet. A dear friend who visited earlier this summer told me that she had not realized that I was still dealing with phantom pain all these years later, until she read one of my earlier posts.

It occurred to me that involuntary expressions of pain are not my choice; when the pain gets bad enough, my body performs it whether I want to or not. And when pain first begins anew, I often frown and sigh or gasp, even if the severity remains on the lower half of the scale, signaling pain’s reappearance. But in the middle of the scale, I have some discretion, some choice over the performance.

My recognition of choice in the matter triggered my OCD-ish tendencies. Am I being dishonest if I hide the pain? Am I asking for pity if I give cues that aren’t completely necessary or involuntary? Am I just feeling sorry for myself if I let others know I am in pain? Is it possible that it helps people to be patient with me if I give them occasional reminders that I am often in pain? If I let people know I am in pain too often, will that make them not want to be around me–will they think I’m negative, whiny, needy? Will they think I’m strong or just lousy at managing a chronic pain condition?

I never pretend to be pain, but how to perform the degree of pain I experience, and whether to perform it at all, are often (but not always) a choice. I find that both comforting and a burden.

 

 

So I bought a fish on vacation in Maine this summer. Not as a dinner entre–although I had some wonderful haddock while I was there–and not as a pet either.

No, I fell for a large, welded metal fish. I found it while browsing in a gallery in Boothbay Harbor with Glenn.

I don’t actually know what to call the thing I bought. Statue? Object d’art? Tchotchke? Dust-catcher?

Glenn didn’t love The Fish but could see that I did, and we agreed that it could go in the breakfast nook. We have a peace-promoting policy in our partnership: we have to both really like a piece of art for it to be placed in our living room, but we can each decorate our offices, the TV room, and other smaller spaces more or less at will. Glenn remained stubbornly immune to my new-found fish’s charms, but I knew it would enhance my coastal themed nook, so I was fine with that.

We had it shipped home, and I beamed at Glenn as he placed it carefully on the shelf I had decreed as The Fish’s spot. Glenn chuckled, clearly laughing at me, but gently and with love and appreciation for my weird self.

I’ve now shown The Fish to several friends and family members, all of whom have given me the same vague “that’s nice” response. No one else sees the magic and whimsy. No one else detects the playful contrast between live, floppy, wet, fish bodies and a cold, sturdy fish made out of scrap iron. No one else senses that this fish radiates a happy energy.

Hey, you gotta do you, as my hip young students say. And I gotta do me. It’s liberating to be able to say, even in this small way, that I don’t need others’ approval to express myself. I don’t need to bow to what’s cool or trendy or fashionable rather than embracing what brings me joy.

The Fish is only the latest of my unusual collection. In my school office, I have a mobile of multi-colored cats and a bi-plane made out of Diet Coke cans hanging from my ceiling. A Periodic Table of the Desserts adorns my wall, adjacent to an old-school metal Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It!” sign, a sun-catcher with a cute cat on it that my paternal grandmother gave me years ago, and a miniature drawing of the “Make Way for Ducklings” statue in Boston’s Public Garden. I have a giant pen shaped like a flamingo with a head of fluffy feathers, and thanks to my BFF, a Crazy Cat Lady action figure, complete with several tiny plastic cats.

Following in the long tradition of eccentric women, I am comfortable with my oddness and aware that it sometimes sets me apart. I don’t know if it is my advancing age,  intersectional feminist values, or fabulous role models — probably all of the above — but it feels good to embrace the metal-fish-loving person I have become.

As I sipped my chai tea and ate my muffin this morning, I smiled contentedly at my fish   — and at myself.