All it takes is a twinge. A pain, no matter how small. Any soreness whatsoever and my mind is off to the races.
“You've messed it up." "You've reinjured yourself." "You've done something wrong and now your foot is not healing." "It's irretrievably broken and it's all your fault."
My mind, the master meaning-making machine, tells a big fat story. These days my mind's story-telling muscles flex ferociously around my broken foot.
Scaredypants: A Story
Scaredypants: A Story
I am at my follow up appointment and the doctors huddle around the xrays with concern. The surgeon is called in. Brows are knit. They don't like the way it looks. They will have to do surgery. They aren't sure it will work but it's a desperate next step. It will keep me off my feet for another 3-6 months. And it may well never heal properly. And my life as I know it will be over.
I spin and spin and spin. Until I catch myself. Until I pause and remind myself that it's all a made-up story. I don't know anything – not one single thing -- about what's actually happening in my foot.
The mind lunges for the safety of stories. Stories are its way of taking the swirling unknown and making it solid and stable. Stories, even shitty Scaredypants Stories, give us ground to stand on in life's freefall of groundlessness.
In her Psychology Today piece Understanding Interoception, Dr. Marianna Pogosyan describes interoception as our ability to sense and interpret sensations happening inside the body. She goes on to explain that
Interoceptive beliefs, such as how valuable or dangerous people believe their bodily signals are, can matter for experiences like stress. For example, individuals with anxiety sensitivity are more likely to 'catastrophize’ and become distressed by increased heartbeats during a stressor compared to individuals without anxiety sensitivity.
Exactly. The fuel of my anxiety sparks my Scaredypants Story into a catastrophized conflagration. And that fire burns hottest at night. Horizontal thinking, as Liz Gilbert calls it, spurs my mind to scramble for a toehold. In the swirl of fear and uncertainty, it tells me a tale of how everything will be ruined. It may give my mind some sense of control but (no surprise), it feels terrible to the rest of me.
One night, my foot aches and I start in on telling the tired old Scaredypants Story. I pause and remind myself that this is just fictive fortune telling. What if I told myself a better story? A perfect story, even.
Susan’s Perfectypants Story
Perfectypants: Another Story
I get the follow-up x-rays and the doctors again huddle around but this time they are with amazement and delight. "Wow! We've never seen such complete healing before!" "Your foot has healed stronger than ever. There is nothing you can't do on it now." "You just go right ahead and throw that boot out the window or, if you'd rather, smash it with every ounce of your strength on a rock. Either way." Then they ask if they can take my picture and use my x-rays to teach young orthopedists how this healing thing is done.
The Perfectypants Story makes me laugh. It's easy to see that it's ridiculously silly. In a way that it's not so easy to see that the Scaredypants Story is. But they both are. They are both utter fictions.
Dr. Pogosyan goes on to say
[I]t is important to find a middle ground. On the one hand, people who over-focus on the body may be more likely to “over-detect” or overinterpret their bodily signals—such as in cases of hypochondriasis or anxiety. But it’s also problematic to go too far the other way and actively ignore, suppress, or discount bodily signals. ... A middle ground—not too much and not too little interoception—is likely optimal for physical and psychological health.
The Middle Way
Buddhists call it The Middle Way: neither leaning in nor pulling away, neither grasping nor resisting but rather resting in the space between.
Pema Chödrön writes, “The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.”
There is an odd, awkward comfort in dropping the story, relaxing with the not-knowing and seeing the stories for what they are. And when we do choose to tell ourselves a story, why not make it one that makes you laugh?