Getting Back Up

I am down and down hard…battling harder than I have battled in a while and at times feel like it will never get better and I hear that old song that used to play in my head “just give up”….”there is nothing you can do”….”you will never get up again”.   And old thoughts and habits are like broken records if we let them and will play over and over, especially when we are down and fighting the hardest for that is when we are the weakest.

Experience has taught me that no matter if I am down….no matter how many times I fall…no matter how many times I fail to pull myself back up, I still have the chance and the power to do it. If I fall down  five hundred times, then I try to get up five hundred and one times and keep trying until I do. It does not matter how many times I fall…what matters is how many times I keep trying to get up. There is no shame in falling. The shame comes in staying down.

It is hard when battling severe pain and we can lose our focus and give in to the pain and cry and scream and just want to give up and even beg and plead with God to take it away.  I have learned that if I ever let pain, failure, heartache..whatever ….take over my mind, then the voice of reason goes out the door.  I have lost my edge. Things like pain, heartache, sorrow, grief…run on the fuel of emotion and the more my emotions get out of control, the less control I have on what I am doing and feeling.

As I laid here last nite and the pain was raging like a forest fire out of control, and son was getting me stripped down to shorts and my tank top and was literally dousing me in the Cool Blue Gel that is supposed to help calm that horrible nerve and muscle pain, and was giving me break through medicine and hooking up the tens unit electrodes and massaging my poor legs, I had begun to wonder would anything give me some release as the electrical nerve jabbing pains jerked my legs in agony.

And I found myself talking inside my head to the pain, telling it that it was not going to win. I was not screaming at the pain anymore, nor was i giving into the pain. I was just calmly talking to the pain and that calmness transcended to the rest of my body and helped me to regain my balance. And the calmer I talked, the more son worked on me, I felt myself rising up again knowing that I was ready for the next round. I had gotten my second wind so to speak.

And so I set myself to doing simple things to keep me focused and not let the pain siren distract my emotional balance again. I focused on breathing…such a simple thing and yet I focused on breathing in and out and when I breathed out, I blew and blew visualizing those pain mongers blowing out of my body. Doing this over and over and focusing on what I was doing was soothing like in the sense of watching the waves come in at the ocean. As you are so intent on watching the waves and hearing the water, you shut out the distractions around you and that helps soothe those fractured nerves.

After many failed attempts, I finally pulled myself up and out of the hole. It does not matter how many times I fell but it sure does matter how many times I made it up and once is all it takes.  And I did it. Sometimes we can give up too soon and never know if the next time will do it. I might smell like cool gel, look like I have been through a war, my hair might be clinging to my head damp from the sweat of hurting so much, my face creased with tear stains and none of that matters because I pulled myself back up…one more time. And that is how we have to live…not giving up but trying  “one more time”……Every time.

image from 1oet.com