After surgery, I had planned to take two weeks off of work. The actual surgery itself didn’t sound as intense as some prior ones I’ve had, but I had at least some sense that it would take some time to readjust.
In the end I took four weeks off, and I’m hugely grateful to my job and the team I work with for accomodating that so kindly. For those four weeks, I slept, recovered, panicked, vibed, walked in the park, researched accessibility aids, and screamed into pillows with the rage of a thousand suns.
I have never, in my adult life at least, felt so unrelentingly enragingly constantly frustrated as I did in those first four weeks. I fucked up everything I tried doing, and since almost all of the things I tried to do in that time were self care activities like drying my hair or texting with friends, that took a huge emotional toll.
Have you ever had a moment where clumsy mistakes chain together, and you drop something, stub your toe, bump your head, spill your drink, and fill a text window with typos when you try to tell someone about what just happened?
Some days it feels like I’ve been in that mode steadily since Oct 2023.
I spill food on myself. I miss my mouth when I drink from my water bottle. I drop things I’m holding; I click the wrong link while browsing; I whack everyone and everything with the padding on my arm brace.
It’s certainly at least a little better now, a year + later, partially because I’m getting less clumsy (less, not none), but definitely also because my frustration threshold has been forcably moved, a thing past me wouldn’t have believed could happen.
That first month was utterly enraging. Everything I tried to do the old way failed to work because I was doing it one-handed with the wrong hand; every new tool I tried that supposedly would improve my life turned out to have at minimum a big learning curve, and more often than not a whole range of capitalist cruft woven into it; and the whole time I was locked in a vicious internal battle against all the toxic independance and deepseated ableist shame that had been waiting for me in my head.
I’m maybe making light here, but the rage was exhausting. I took four full weeks off of work, and I am glad I did, because I was not in a state where I would have been a positive presence on my team.
The frustration is still there; the shame and toxic independance are still there.
I misclick with my left handed mouse and close the screen I was on without saving, and the red fog threatens to roll back in.
A friend lovingly jokes about the nonsense that a dictation tool made out of my attempt to text them, and the mental tornado siren starts to spin up.
I burn myself mildly on the airfryer trying to cook dinner solo, and every curseword I know lines up behind my tongue, promising catharsis.
I am, however, less overwhelmed by it, than I was that first month. That’s largely thanks to arsenal of management techniques I have built up: I step away, I take breaks, I made a catharsis playlist for when a big feeling starts camping out in me and I can’t dislodge it. I know that having eaten is the first key to patience. And I know that some days I am just going to have to label as “FUBAR” on the calendar and treat as throwaways. But yes. Recovery has been frustrating.
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