I Can Do Hard Things

The Delicate Dance Between Respecting & Pushing My Limits

Picture taken November 2022

Last week, I announced at the end of my article an anticipated change in the frequency of my publications. Some of you may have missed it if you didn’t scroll to the bottom, past my usual closing remarks.

What I shared is this:

For the next few months - summer and fall - my personal goals are shifting priorities. I am unsure if I will be publishing every week.

I have multiple writing projects, including my other publications, Remember Me and Pawsitive Love. I also need time to complete the books I have been working on.

Last year, while my mother was in hospital care, I postponed home improvements that were already underway. Now that winter has come and gone, I am eager to see these home projects completed and enjoy the great outdoors while leaving time for relationships.

I’m not abandoning my writing. It just will happen as time and weather permit.

I have many articles in development, so there is no shortage of material. This is more about taking off the pressure to perform and to remove expectations of a weekly publication.

I appreciate your understanding and support.

Rock Dunder, Ontario Parks 2020

While I spoke truthfully, I wasn’t fully transparent. More on this in a bit.

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I am trying to discern the difference between “explaining myself” (a pattern I wish to break as it is part of my conditioning field with my open crown and throat centers) and communicating honestly to build trust and foster connection.

Whether I am building that trust and connection between you and me or with just yourself, I cannot say. Of the two options, the trust I most wish to foster is with yourself.

As I write this, it’s only been four days since I shared the update. Not enough time for you, my readers, to notice anything different. Yet, I can feel the difference and I am not entirely comfortable with it. It’s a delicate dance between respecting and pushing my limits, and my rhythm changes with the seasons.

Putting down my pen, even for a couple of days, has impacted my mood and my mental wellbeing. It’s clear to me that I need to write. Writing has been instrumental in building trust and connection within myself. But my need goes beyond my relationship with myself.

Writing allows me to show up in the world in a way my private life doesn’t allow. Not because I behave differently. It’s largely environmental. I live alone in the country with a small circle of friends. I have a hermit lifestyle, and I’ve grown to love my solitude.

I’ve not always relished this freedom.

Socializing isn’t natural or easy for me.

Substack is like going to a coffee shop without all the noise or awkward introductions. Here, I don’t feel the need to force myself on anyone or the need to fake being comfortable if I’m not. There’s no need to pretend for either person. You can read my material and choose to stick around for as long as you like, or leave without apologies, and no one has to suffer rejection or judgment.

I trust that my audience understands that I don’t live in this coffee shop. It’s just a place I like to visit. It’s a place where I can share my experiences and reflections that have bettered my life. It’s not so much about the stories that I share but the questions that these stories invoke.

I know from my experiences on both sides of the therapists’ table that if the right questions aren’t being asked, we feel stuck, and transformation doesn’t happen.

Perhaps by sharing my stories of how I was stuck in my patterns and what eventually led to my shift in perspective can help you to ask yourself similar questions. When we’re too close to something, especially if it’s currently on-going, we aren’t able to see things even though they are right in front of us. Reading about someone else’s experiences has the potential of giving you a new perspective.

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I have another pattern that I wish to break. When I am hurting, I withdraw. Not because I don’t want to burden others (although that was how I was conditioned), but because I don’t need rescuing. No one is responsible for me. I’m an adult, and I don’t have to respond with the same survival strategies I used as a kid. My happiness and well-being are all on me. I will do what is necessary to sustain myself.

I recognize when I am hurting, I withdraw into myself, which isn’t a defect. It’s what is correct for me with my role model/hermit profile. What is healthy for my body is my hermit nature. However, I can still do that while allowing others to see me when I’m not at my best. That’s the part I want to allow instead of always hiding or keeping my discomfort to myself.

Recently, I suffered a neck injury and then, a couple of weeks later, a back injury. Because of these injuries, I took a break from playing badminton. When I felt capable of playing again, I still wasn’t at 100%, and I was clear in saying to the other players, “I’m at about 85%, but I will give a 100% of 85%”. I didn’t deny myself the opportunity to have fun. In the past, I wouldn’t have shown up if I weren’t 100%.

If you have an open ego center and are a generator like me, you may have been conditioned to have a competitive drive. Conversely, instead of being highly competitive, you may quit without really giving something a go if you think you’re not going to be great at it. It’s the defeatist attitude. Either way, you can be labelled as a poor sport for not wanting to play sports or because you get upset if you lose. These are examples of how we become identified with a conditioned self.

My conditioned self would have been obsessed with keeping score and a record of how many matches I won or lost. Now, I’m just having the time of my life playing a fun sport. Often, unable to play because I’ve broken into full-body laughter at something spontaneous and ridiculous.

But I digress…

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In saying “I wasn’t fully transparent” last week, I recognize that I only shared the pretty version and withheld the ugly bits because it wasn’t’ safe to need others.

This was a survival strategy that I learned in childhood, having grown up in a violent home and having experienced a wide range of bullying.

Despite that, I want to be transparent with my readers without seeking your permission to change my priorities. I noticed that by sharing only the pretty version or a half-truth, this was still another form of masking.

That’s the pattern I want to change. I want to allow space for my imperfections, flaws, and weaknesses to be witnessed, for they are part of me and my life story. I don’t need to Botox my life story to make it easier to witness.

So, I am admitting I have fibromyalgia.

I am proud of just how much I can do for myself. At the same time, I want to stop sugar coating pain. Pain is real, and pain is part of life.

There was a time when I suffered in silence and was equally unhappy in my life. That is no longer my situation.

In 87 articles and 100s of posts, I believe I’ve only mentioned the word fibromyalgia twice. I generally avoid talking about it because I don’t want pity.

It’s known as a debilitating and incurable disease.

It’s not given much consideration by the medical community. Sure, it’s a mystery, but “it’s not a death sentence,” as I’ve been told by one doctor. A doctor who didn’t understand that living with such a disease can feel like a death sentence, or how many who suffer from this disease may consider ending their lives.

What gets ignored is how this disease feels like it robs you of your identity, your life, and the real struggle of being in your body.

I’ve used this disease to teach me about self-care, to recognize my needs. It has been my barometer at any given moment on how well I am doing. I have been able to fully claim myself and transform my life. Yes, it altered the direction of my life, but for my betterment.

When I was first diagnosed with this disease in 2001, doing the dishes for two people was an all-day task. Using my hands to clean utensils could bring me to tears from the pain, not that I allowed anyone to see me like that. My body bruised easily. The fibro fog (when the brain is so overwhelmed from processing pain signals, it cannot process other environmental information, leaving you feeling dazed and confused) was scary, as I could forget where I was driving or how to get where I was going, even in familiar places.

I think these experiences have helped me relate better with my mother and her memory loss. I know firsthand how scary and disorienting that is.

I have been slowly transforming my house into my sanctuary - a place where my body can be at peace and ease.

This, too, is a new experience for me. I never felt at home growing up. I was moved around a lot and not always with my family. When I was too much for my mother, she sent me away. I was also removed from my home as a pre-teen by child protection and placed in foster care.

The concept of a home was never a permanent thing for me. I’ve owned many properties but never made them MY home.

It took me several years before I made the conscious decision to invest in my home, to make this my place, where I want to stay.

The reality is, when I say, “I am eager to see these home projects completed and enjoy the great outdoors while leaving time for relationships”, I am pushing my limits and comfort zone. The work I am doing with home projects is hard on my body, my nervous system, and in some ways, emotionally and mentally challenging.

I recognize that going outside your comfort zone is where growth happens, but I need to be careful because there’s a right way and a wrong way to grow. The wrong way leads to health problems, or specifically for me, triggers my fibromyalgia.

I can tolerate short-term pain for the long-term benefits of having my home set up in a way that fully supports my needs.

Having successfully masked my autism for decades has taught me that I can do hard things. Now, with the help of understanding my Human Design, that delicate dance between respecting my limits and pushing them has increased my ability to do more with my body despite this disease.

Recently, I did some deck staining, I mowed my lawn (a 3-hour task), and started preparing my freshly built, raised garden beds for planting, all in one day. Clearly, these are all physically demanding tasks and some that challenge my autism like operating the mower.

I’m sharing this because people (not here on Substack) have remarked about my easy life. They see me as if I am on some permanent vacation. I take no offense from their ignorance. The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. I have worked hard to create this beautiful life.

This is just a friendly reminder that there is much that your eyes fail to see. Many conditions and disabilities are invisible. If I weren’t to disclose my autism or my fibromyalgia, no one would see what my life really is like.

I respect that I have to allow my body time to recover, and that’s the truth. If I am dealing with pain, then I may not be able to concentrate on my writing.

I’m no longer hiding my pain from others and that’s why it’s essential for me to be transparent with you. I am no longer willing to sacrifice my wellbeing to maintain an outward appearance of being superhuman. I am human. Nothing more.

Perhaps you have grown accustomed to my weekly newsletter, and that’s wonderful.

I am here not because I have to be, but because I want to be. Writing for an audience has been filling my cup with joy! Yet, I am being cautious not to fall into the conditioning of mass media marketing - the common messages of how to build an audience, and how to be successful by showing up “consistently,” as in with regularity. I don’t subscribe to that. I subscribe to following my rhythm and what gives me satisfaction. Period.

I don’t believe what I write is going to resonate with everyone. It either does or it doesn’t.

There is no one right way of how to show up in the world. The closest motto to that is to “be true to yourself”.

The biggest shift for me has been that when I am allowing my body to recover, my happiness doesn’t diminish. I don’t go into a tailspin just because I’m not being productive.

I’m 52 years old, and a month and a half ago was the first time that in my complete inability to function I gave myself the grace to just be, to do nothing, to allow my body the grace it needed to rest, to reset, and recharge.

It’s the first time I didn’t fall into the guilt trip because I wasn’t being productive. F*%k the demands of “normalcy” sometimes doing nothing isn’t doing nothing but absolutely the MOST IMPORTANT thing we need to do.

The Delicate Dance Between Respecting & Pushing My Limits:

Writing is a creative process. It cannot be forced. Otherwise, it will drain my energy, and that’s not the correct way of pushing my limits. When I respect my energy and rhythm, writing is a source of energy.

For me, the aspect of pushing my limits when I am writing is about speaking my truth even if it makes me uncomfortable.

One question that Autistic Ang asked me, “What part of yourself do you edit out of your work the most?”, still circulates in my mind. That’s how I discovered that I had edited out part of my truth last week, which has led to this rambling of a monologue this week!

Writing is only one part of my life. An important part, yes.

My health and well-being are what is most important to me. I am dedicated to living a balanced life between work, play, and rest. Connecting with others, my readers, friends and my mother, and being alone. Those are my priorities.

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One last word about transparency.

I do caution who and when you share your wounds with. I may not be the best example of that, as I may appear like I am an open book for all to read.

If you share with the wrong people or too soon because you’re looking for support while you’re still feeling vulnerable, you may be putting yourself at further risk of injury.

Only share your pain with people you can trust, or when it can’t cause you harm if someone throws it back in your face.

If you’re not okay with others talking about your pain, then that’s a clear sign you’re not ready to share it with others.

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Thank you for taking the time, your precious time, to read my writing, for seeing me, and choosing to stick around.

With love 🫶🏻

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So interesting that while I was writing about being a burden, this came across my feed… I love her work!