quoting from an awesome blog post & the second of my eight days of happiness

[firecat]

The bold part of the excerpts below also qualifies as my "what I am happy about today" meme. (For me it's not every day and it's been a lot less than fifteen years, but long enough that I really understand what she's talking about.)

http://www.therotund.com/?p=527

The Rotund's guest blogger Rebecca posts about difficulties with the definition of health. Excerpts:

Sometimes it’s a bit oppressive to live in a culture that believes that regular exercise always leads to a higher exercise capacity. That’s not true for everyone. Because I have CFIDS and fibromyalgia, I’ve been perceived as lazy and deluded.
[...]
I was once told by a massage therapist that the subgroup of her patients who’ve had bad physical reactions to her massage is the same subgroup of her patients who “want to be sick.” [....] Fat folks receive the same blame, the same labels of “difficult.” (If we weren’t difficult we’d have laid off the baby-flavored donuts already and become thin.) Both groups are told we’re lying about our body’s physical workings.
[...]
There’s one way in which being sick and in pain every day for fifteen years makes fatpol a little easier for me. I appreciate what my body can DO. I’m so euphoric on days when I can take a walk or cook a goulash that residual insecurity about fatness wafts away on a breeze of triviality.
[...]
Thinking we can completely control our health has a quality of bargaining with God or performing magical rituals. Of course there are healthful actions people can take. But the degree to which those actions succeed, especially given the myriad other factors in everyone’s life, is often complex and untraceable.

Comments

[leback.livejournal.com]

This is really awesome; thank you for sharing it!

The first snippet you quote is resonating particularly with me. I spent most of my life believing that laziness was what prevented me from achieving any goal I set for myself, and also buying into those cultural beliefs about exercise. When ADHD treatment started helping me out of "laziness," one of the first things I did was go out and injure my knees by pushing myself too hard on hiking trails.

I'm not actually sick or in pain all that often, but maybe learning to accept my cognitive and physical limitations will still teach me some of the same body-acceptance lessons that she's describing here. It gives me a very appealing goal to shoot for, anyway.

[jenk]

When ADHD treatment started helping me out of "laziness," one of the first things I did was go out and injure my knees by pushing myself too hard on hiking trails.

Meanwhile, when asthma treatment helped my lung capacity, one of the first things I did was injure my leg by pushing myself too hard :)

[firecat]

When ADHD treatment started helping me out of "laziness," one of the first things I did was go out and injure my knees by pushing myself too hard on hiking trails.

Yeah. I was anemic for quite a while and unable to exercise much at all. Now I am not anemic, but my body is in a condition where if I do any new physical activity with the enthusiasm I used to—and want to—bring to physical activity, I get injured.

[leback.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite *glad* to know it's not just me, but... :-)

[leback.livejournal.com]

That sounds frustrating, and especially so in a world that constantly echoes the "motivation is all it takes" nonsense that one hears everywhere.

For a while, I found it a sort of odd coincidence that my identification with "disability" began around two entirely unrelated impairments at nearly the same time. Eventually I put the pieces together and realized the coincidence wasn't at all random.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's necessarily always going to be that way, though. I think you'll get past it, but that it may take a long time.

[firecat]

I think you're right. If I ramp up a new form of exercise slowly enough, I don't get injured. It's just frustrating because I can't follow my instincts and do what I used to be able to do.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I completely hear you on that. My biggest problem is overstretching. It took me...over a year, maybe two years, and some very painful adventures, to figure out that just because I can stretch way beyond what is normal for most people, I shouldn't necessarily do that.

Slow and steady wins the race.:)

[firecat]

Yeah, I got a really bad injury from overstretching once.