To Be Hurt Is Human

So, I just got back from this amazing workout and I want to try and capture how I’m feeling at the moment.

Three weeks ago I hurt myself trying to do all these new workout moves and just trying to up my game as an athlete (so funny that I’m calling myself an “athlete).

(watch video or read below):

I’ve been working-out since I was about 4 years old and working-out for me is like brushing my teeth —  but I would never actually call myself an “athlete” except that I’m still exhausted at the moment.

Anyways, I was trying to up my game – and I hurt myself.

Instead of acknowledging that I was hurt, I just tried to push on through because I thought I was being weak, I thought I was finding an excuse and I thought it wasn’t trying hard enough.

It got so bad – I hurt my lower back – that I couldn’t even sleep.  And so it started that Round-Robin thing – where you can’t sleep, so your body can’t heal itself, and you’re still in pain and you can’t sleep…

I mean it just kept going on and on and finally I had to call my doctor.

I hate doctors.

Actually, I don’t “hate” doctors but you know what I mean.  I had to call and we had a conversation about what I had to do and basically he said, “You need to stop doing any physical activity whatsoever.  I just want you to try to walk around the block if you can do that but no more working-out. You need to let your body heal.”

And I didn’t really answer him back at first because I was kind of stunned.  And then he said,  “Did you hear me?  I said you have to let your body heal!”  And he said it in kind of a “fatherly” way even though he’s younger than I am – but it’s been stuck in my head. Basically, my doctor had just yelled at me about not listening to my body.

So, I did what he told me to do. I did the icing, the Advil and I did very little “physicality” at all (my God I’m so tired I just had a crazy workout by the way).

But this isn’t about working-out.  That’s not why I’m doing this video. 

The reason why I’m doing this video is because I want to share this moment I had after leaving my trainer today and while I was in the car…

I think I don’t listen to myself when I’m in pain emotionally or mentally.  I have a feeling a lot of us do that. Instead of listening to ourselves and acknowledging that somebody hurt us, or that work was painful today, or that something didn’t workout.   I think a lot of us do what I do — which is just push it aside or ignore it – and just plowing on through anyway.  It’s so much easier to push things aside than it is to deal with them.

And what I realized with the whole “back” [pain] thing is this:   that when I can acknowledge that I’m in pain, when I can realize that it has nothing to do with weakness and it has nothing to do with not being a “strong” person, but has everything to do with actually being human  – that YOU can get hurt sometimes.  When you can acknowledge that you’re hurt, then you can go about finding the remedies:  to heal thyself, to help thyself, to feel better.

It’s just something that I realized driving back.  That I want to take away from the whole experience from the past 3 to 4 weeks of being in such pain and not being able to work-out.

I just wanted to share that with all of you.

Thank you again for stopping by.  I appreciate it so much.

Have a sweet day and I’ll be back again soon for sure!

Bye.

Carmen