I’ve been musing about the end of the year and the beginning of the next. In the last post I wrote about it, I was just more musing about life and movies. Now, as I’m writing this, it’s the actual first of the new year. There has been snow, which makes my cold heart happy. And it’s appreciable enough to be shoveled.
There is nothing like freshly-fallen snow to make it so wintery. It makes everything seem possible (ignoring the fact that it’ll be gray, slushy, and dirty within a few months), and it just makes me so happy.
I don’t make resolutions because I find them artificial and pressure-inducing. I do goals instead because while it may just be semantics, it’s more open-ended to me. Also, I see resolutions more as things you HAVE to do on the regular (like going to the gym three times a week*)
Part of the reason, I assume is because even though it’s a new year, we’re still the same people we were the day before. And the new year doesn’t mean circumstances change. It’s like when people ask how I feel on my birthday. Uh, the same? It’s just one day. I’m aging by the minute–not by the year.
I like to set goals because you work towards them and it’s not immediate. I don’t like gamefying things that aren’t actually games. I know other people do it (like visiting Duolingo every day), but it just stresses me out. It taps into my OCD traits in a very nasty way.
I have a perfectionism streak that tells me that if I don’t do something perfectly, I might as well not do it at all. That is from my mother, honestly. She is a Tiger Mom in some ways. If I do something with a ‘I have to do it every day’ mentality, then I can go to a very dark place.
It’s different with my Taiji/Bagua routine–which, by the way, I went back to doing it strictly today. For the last week, I’d been doing the stretches, but then freestyling it with my weapons. So I’m a bit achy getting back to the actual forms. It’s astounding how quickly the body goes, “NOPE.” But it’s also just as quick to get it back again. Yes, I was achy after doing the full routine, but I’m fine now.
This is not new info, by the way. A habit takes on average 66 days to form. I’m assuming that’s doing it every day. Once it’s a habit, though, it’s easier to get back to it if you let it go for a few days. Of course, the longer you’re away from the routine, the longer it’ll take to get back into it–and you’ll probably have to ease yourself back into it more gently.
When I had my medical crisis, I was unconcious for a week. Then, I was in the hospital for another week. When I got out, I was eager to get back to my (at the time) Taiji routine. I was weak as a baby, but my brain retained the routine. The third day, I picked up my wooden sword (as opposed to the stainless steel one) and did the first three movements (postures). It made me as shaky as a leef, and I had to put it down immediately. But I was so relieved I had remembered the first three movements effortlessly.
My parentns went back home three months to the day my medical crisis happened. I declared myself nearly 100% back to ‘normal’ (normal in quotes because normal is not a thing. And I was never going to be the same person I was before).
Many months after I returned home from the hospital, I watched a video by a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. It was about what to expect when you had a stroke. The doctor was saying that you could have a good life, blah, blah, blah, but he made it clear (without explicitly saying it) that you would not be the same. My medical team made sure to explain to me what would probably happen in the future. The occupational therapist (I think? I was so drugged out, I’m not sure) told me that it commonly took six months to a year to recover from a stroke. Then she added that it could take much longer (like more years) with the implication that I might never get there underlying her words.
I was, as I was told over and over again by the people in the know, a miracle. Seriously. So many of my medical team told me I was miracle. It was weird because I get that what happened to me didn’t happen. Ever. And, yes, that was a miracle. But I, myself, was not a miracle. And I did nothing to ‘earn’ that miracle as it were.
Yes, I would say that doing Taiji for over a decade probably primed me for the miracle, but that’s just a fraction of what went into the miracle. I liked to say that there were three things that brought me back to life. Luck, love, and Taiji. I would say Taiji was a quarter, love was a quarter, and luck was fifty percent.
I am under no illusion that I deserved to live. I did not. Not that I deserved to die–but that just in the game of life, there is no way to earn that right. We all will die. When it’s your time–it’s your time. It wasn’t my time, but it had nothing to do with ME.
It’s funny. While I was in the hospital, i had two nurses who worked the heart ICU who had to see me once I woke up. The first was a nurse who sat with me while I was unconscious. She was tearing up and struggling not to cry. She told me she had to see me while I was awake because she had sat with me while I was unconscious and held my hand.
I thanked her for doing that, and I meant it! Her job was a hard one, and I was glad I could provide her with a positive moment. Can you imagine working the heart ICU? 90% of people who get a heart attack don’t make it.** So she was sitting by my bed, holding my mand, knowing I probably wouldn’t wake up. That has to take a toll on someone.
The second woman was a nurse who was usually on the ICU floor but requested to be on my shift. She told me she had to see me. It was a strange feeling being a medical rock star for nothing I had any part of.
That went completely off the rails! Well, not completely. Because one goal I have for 2024 is to write my memoir. Not just about my medical crisis, but that would be the grounding point.
You see, I have spent my whole life until that point being depressed, anxious, and hating my body. I didn’t see the point of life. At all. I wasn’t suicidal, but I would not have swerved out of the way if a car was aimed at me.
Until I actually did die. Twice. And I said, “Not today, Death.” It’s like I babbled at Ian after I woke up with all the choice drugs coursing through my veins, “When you pick a fight with the Devil, you better be stronger than Hell!” (Except I said ‘If’ at the beginning.) And I qucikly added, “And I was. Twice!”
That’s all for now. More tomorrow.
*It’s a pretty well-known fact that a staggering amount of people give up on their resolutions within a month or two in the new year . In fact, I just Googled it. 80% of people give up on the ‘lose weight, diet, exercise more’ resolutions by mid-February.
**Standard qualifier. If the cardiac arrest happens in the hospital, then there’s a 20% chance of living. If CPR is administered, that jumps to 30%. That’s still shitty odds–1 in 3. No idea what two cardiac arrests in a row does to the stats. I couldn’t find any statts for that.