Functional
Functional,
Put on your mask.
Smile.
Blend.
Pretend.
Different under that skin,
Writhing,
Seething,
Beast of pain within.
Adjust that mask.
Smile.
Functional.
In some sense, I had the chronic pain version of Achiever Fever when I worked. Perhaps you can relate to this. Some of you will be quite familiar with it.
It comes right from:
It is where you don’t want to give up your career, you ignore your body, and you just push and push through. Burn, baby, burn.
Until you can’t.
I pushed for way too long. Until I had fantasies of having a stroke and dying or just ending up in the hospital for a break… just a wee rest. Then maybe a well-timed fatal heart attack. Not my fault, or anything, just natural causes. Then ardently suicidal thoughts. And two attempts. That all was well over a decade. A slow slippery slope decline of pain and depression and hopelessness. Deeper. Darker.
But I get it.
I do.
I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I have ambitions. I have a strong work ethic (that I cannot achieve, ever. Any of them. Because of entirely unrealistic expectations for myself). We all have desires and goals. We all want to progress in our careers. We have wants. We all have wants. In all areas of our lives. We have goals and desires.
The problem
With perfectionists, in particular, we don’t want to accept defeat or what we perceive to be a failure. We perceive a lot to be a failure that actually is anything but. So we want to achieve our goals and desire and when we can’t, literally can’t, we feel that sense of defeat and failure. So we do it even though we can’t.
With chronic pain, pain pushes back when you overextend yourself. Hard. So you push back hard. Inevitably it wins that game. It always wins that game. You end up with lower self-worth and a sense of failure. A failure you didn’t earn. It is just that we have limitations and when we consistently don’t follow them there are consequences. If we’re incapable of something it isn’t a failure to not actually be able to do it. It isn’t a personal failure of our character to have a physical limitation. But that is what I said to myself.
So you… compromise
So maybe you can’t Not work. But maybe you can work less. Or try to improve every aspect of our health humanly possible and hope it does something before things get mentally and emotionally rather difficult. Like yoga. Or acupuncture. Psychology. Meditation. Supplements. Hell, you will try them all and more in hopes that doing that will enable you to work. You may then slow down all other aspects of life in order to partially function at work. So there goes the social life. There goes everything except work.
You may go on several leaves of absence in hopes something done during them will solve the problem. You may try to get certain accommodations. But when you show you’re not dependable, not reliable, and not able to be consistently functional there is a problem. As in you. You are the problem to your employer.
That is when I went down to part-time. And it was the same. High pain doesn’t wait for days off, unfortunately. And then, of course, I did get sicker again, this time with vertigo. Some compromises work. Some work for a short duration. Some just do not work at all. And sometimes we just get too sick to function in the workplace and we cannot make compromises anymore.
I’m not saying compromises don’t work for some. Sometimes they are a very effective tool for us. I will say, it wasn’t long after being on part-time I considered going full-time again. Convincing myself I could handle it. Because that is a thing I did. A pattern I followed. Push and push and push. But my health had other plans before I could even attempt that.
The blame game
It is that sense of failure and lower self-worth that makes you blame yourself for being weak or not pushing through better. Then comes a crapton of guilt. You think I’m just not functional in society as a human being. Because perfectionism dictates constant and consistent effort towards an unattainable goal. You never achieve perfection.
With chronic illness, you may not be able to achieve basic goals. That just rubs the wrong way with your perfectionism and achiever fever. It makes you feel lesser as a person because you cannot do something you feel you should be able to do. At all. Let alone to our standards, which are epically high. You could never achieve those standards anyway, let alone with chronic pain.
Acceptance
Eventually, after bashing yourself against a wall for a long time, you come to the conclusion that what you’re doing isn’t working. That work ambitions and goals might have to be given up for more flexible work or less taxing work. Or for a time, no work at all. It is a real battle to give up on a career. It brings up a lot of self-identity issues.
You have to just let some ambitions go. We mourn that, a lot. But accepting things as they are in the moment is a sort of relief. Because when you make yourself so much worse it’s mentally and emotionally and physically exhausting. Accepting you can slow down and help yourself cope feels like you give yourself permission to take care of your well-being.
I got to say achiever fever doesn’t work well with chronic pain and chronic illness. We will never be able to attain our impossible standards. I think that’s the same for healthy people who get locked into this cycle… they burn out. We just burn out faster or harder. I know the answer is focusing on well-being. I know if I don’t, I tank health-wise as well as mentally and emotionally.
I also know how it feels to tell yourself ‘Maybe this time it will be different’ and go back to work when you are too ill and suffer the same consequences. Because you just want things to be different and for some reason, you think ‘yeah, this time I can just push through more’. And you just learn the lesson all over again, the hard way.
So we don’t have typical achiever fever for sure. But we have a chronic pain and illness sort where we just don’t want to give up on our career no matter the consequences. Then there are the consequences. And that doesn’t work out well at all. Not that some of us can hold onto a career. It is all about not exceeding your pain limits every day. If you’re not, then you can certainly keep up with your career with accommodations and some careful pacing. When it gets to the point where you’re consistently exceeding your pain limits and cutting down all other aspects of life… It is a danger zone.
Then when you do accept you cannot work you have to replace that with things you can do. That makes you feel productive and useful. That can be tricky if we do not Value the things we can do and don’t stop focusing on what we can’t. It took me some time for that to happen.
But then denial was always my friend when I worked
Reprint from brainlessblogger.net
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Chronically Nikki 