Light

 

Read to me!

Audio reading of this post here

How do you feel about this past year, 2020?

With the pandemic I imagine many people are looking forward with great anticipation for this year to end.

Will Green Day’s “Good Riddance” become the song of the season at New Year’s Eve?

But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself. Truthfully this reflection is about looking back to a lovely lesson I learned from a lovely woman in 2019. And no better time than the present to share it with you.

In the spring of 2019 I was trying to get back into my career, working in healthcare. Up until this point I was building my work resilience working part time as an improv theatre instructor. In doing so I saw a great opportunity to merge improv with healthcare — combining science & art. I developed my own workshop to help healthcare providers better their counselling skills using the tools of improv. I even submitted this workshop to my profession’s national conference being held in my city that spring. My improv-healthcare workshop was joyfully accepted :)

As a healthcare provider myself, the tables have been turned since my concussions. Never did I think at this age I would be so much on the receiving end of the healthcare system I worked for.

But that’s just it — no one can ever truly predict these events. As unexpected as a concussion may be to anyone who receives one, Post Concussion Syndrome (PCS) continues the journey down “unpredictability lane…”

Chronic pain, extreme fatigue, noise & light sensitivities, and difficulty focusing are sometimes triggered at random. I might wake up each morning not knowing what I can actually do that day. There was a time in my recovery where planning seemed impossible. These spontaneous symptoms are not just frustrating — they’re like a dark pressure that seems to always be looming and pushing down on my very heart and soul…

Ok…maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But when I’m struggling with this, it’s a genuine reflection of how I feel. And it’s how I felt in the spring of 2019.

Just one month before I was to deliver my signature improv for healthcare workshop at my profession’s national conference, I had yet another serious concussion. This was on top of the previous injury I was still recovering from…

4:30 am. I woke up. On the floor. Ears ringing. Not sure how I got there.

I looked around and was able to quickly piece together what had happened.

A few days before I received a horrible treatment that involved some physical manipulation. It was supposed to help ease some pain I had been having. However, the manipulation had the opposite effect and ended up making my pain worse.

That night the celestial black holes must have been aligned… I woke up after 4 am to go to the bathroom. On my way walking from my bedroom to the bathroom, the pain intensified so much that it caused me to lose consciousness mid-step.

On the floor, my feet were in the bathroom and my head was next to the fridge in my apartment kitchen.

“Thank goodness,” I thought as I noticed the dent in my dog’s large bag of food that rested against the refrigerator. “Thank goodness I was too lazy to put that bag of food away.” For if I had put that bag away in the closet, my head would have hit the hard ground.

But dog food and putting off chores aside, there was more to be thankful for.

Enter my upstairs neighbour, Pam.

Pam’s apartment was the exact same layout as mine, however completely different :) There were loose stacks of paper everywhere. Scattered amongst them were different plants, including an enormous aloe that I’d water when she was away. Shelves of books, CDs, collected knick-knacks. And, her acoustic guitar, sheet music, plus other instruments I had never seen nor heard before meeting Pam.

Pam was nearing 60 years of age at the time. She was a psychotherapist and her specialty (if not her soul’s song) was music therapy.

We talked a lot those years I lived in that apartment. Pam always had an empathetic ear and compassionate response to my latest slide down the doom spiral.  She had a more spiritual-religious background, which I don’t fully connect with. But I find the imagery she shared from that background a creative way to look at any given situation. After all, when my perspective doesn’t seem to be working, I lose nothing by learning about another.

4:45 am. I got up off the floor. I sat in a chair. And I called Pam.

She came to my aid, dropped me off at the hospital at my request, and even offered to stay, though I declined.

Superstar neighbour, amiright?

This wasn’t the only time Pam had helped me with my post concussion conundrums. And not the only way either.

Despite the painful mishap that night, I still wanted to deliver my workshop at my profession’s national conference the following month. Considering how little I was able to leave even just my neighbourhood at the time, venturing downtown and staying focused and engaged, facilitating a mental, physical, and emotional workshop, probably wasn’t the best idea with a new injury…

But this was a year of work I had put into this workshop! It was my own creative baby. Something actually NEW.

That I DID.

During my recovery!

To lose that…

To grieve that…

The very thought was painful.

Needless to say, the day before I was to deliver that workshop, I was freaking out.

My symptoms. Got. So. Much. Worse.

So up the stairs I went to talk it over with Pam.

Pam talked to me about the idea of choice. The idea that we often feel bound to limited and unpleasant options, or stuck in a situation where we seemingly have no choice at all.

“We always have choice,” Pam said. Though…I admit, I don’t fully believe in this. Because people don’t choose to be ill. People don’t choose to be poor. People don’t choose to be discriminated against.

But for someone in my situation at the time, I did have more choice than I thought in how to perceive my situation and work with it.

“There’s dark and there’s light,” Pam continued. “When I was in tough times and I noticed the doom spiral, I would say to myself ‘I choose light.’ It allowed me to let in options I hadn’t yet thought of…”

It’s a nice mantra “I choose light.” And indeed in that moment, when I was looking at my near future, I truly believed my only options were to lose, fail, and suffer. In other words, I was choosing dark.

And then, I had this realization:

If I choose to believe that at any moment things can unexpectedly go horrible, then why don’t I also choose to believe that at any moment things can spontaneously go well?

If one is true, then both must be true. The dark wouldn’t be notable if there wasn’t any light.

That conversation with Pam has really stuck with me. It wasn’t our last conversation together, but perhaps one of the last most memorable. Pam passed away just after her 60th birthday later that year in the fall.  The cancer that claimed her was as unpredictable as anything. In her religion and spiritual beliefs there is an after life. I have no doubt that when she arrived at the crossroads between her life on earth and beyond, that she chose light.

I think of this now. Looking back at the years. It would be very easy to choose dark thinking of the past years being ill, losing friends, losing jobs, losing freedoms. But I’m tired of welcoming a new year saying “good riddance” to the last.

After Pam had given me this speech before that national conference, I did choose light. I did go to that conference. I did deliver my improv for healthcare providers workshop. And I did absolutely kick ass :) It was at the time probably the greatest thing I had achieved since my concussions.

So, let me ask you. This transition from 2020 to 2021, what will you choose?

Best in brain light for all,

Krystal