043: On Trusting Yourself Again

Hi friends,

In my last essay, I introduced you all to a couple of new plans I have for Collected Rejections in 2022. That includes the Stories section, which I’ve already begun publishing in. Every Monday morning I send out a writing prompt, and every weekend I send out a short story I wrote that week. It’s based on Ray Bradbury’s challenge to write 52 short stories in a year, and so far it has proved to indeed be a challenge.

Starting next week, you’ll also see interviews in here! Every other week, I’ll be bringing in someone to talk about how they’ve gotten over a difficult rejection. I’ve long believed that failure is a good route to improvement, and hand-in-hand with failure goes rejection. And yet, fear of failure and rejection stops so many people before they ever really start, which is a tragedy. So my goal is to make rejection less scary. I’ve already completed the first few interviews, and they’ll start being published here every other week.

I’ll have more exciting announcements coming soon, but for now I hope that you’ll subscribe to Stories and welcome our first interview guest next week.

Without any further ado, let’s hop into today’s essay.

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I had a whole other essay planned for this week, about a time I was outright rejected and how heartbreaking it was, in fact. But then I was at physical therapy for my knee yesterday, and something my doctor said changed my whole day. Changed today too, in fact.

You might remember that I had knee surgery on December 7th 2021. It was a relatively routine surgery, and one I’ve been needing since roughly 2010. The knee pain I felt pre-surgery varied from pretty mild to downright excruciating, with little warning of when it would shift and no hint of how long I’d be down for the count when it flared up.

Funny isn’t the right word, but ‘funny’ enough, I’d already had this surgery back in 2007. (I’m not getting into details in case any of you are squeamish about medical stuff.) Obviously, it didn’t take that first time, which is why I was back here on the cutting table 14 years later. But the first time I healed fast. Within a month, I was going running again. Which, looking back, is maybe the problem. Oh well.

This time, healing hasn’t been as quick. My knee is still sore most days, and I haven’t been able to walk far on it. I don’t have the full range of motion back yet, though I’m about 95% there. My surgeon joked (kind of) that I’m much older now than the first time I had surgery and so it was natural that healing would come much more slowly.

When he first mentioned this, I mostly laughed, though a teeny tiny part of me cried out at attaching ‘older’ to my early 30s. But I made my peace with it—I’d happily spend a year healing if it meant I could predictably rely on my knee to work. And that’s still true! I still just want my knee to do its job without making me bite my cheek to keep from whimpering in pain every time I move.

(Are you listening, body? Are you listening, knee?)

(COVID season 3 has made me lose my mind. It’s fine, just skip ahead.)

That was before the surgery. When I hit the one month mark again this year—January 7, the date of my last essay—I found myself starting to feel frustrated. I was still limping heavily! I needed crutches to get down stairs still! Where was the young body I’d once had that was ready to go three weeks post-surgery in 2007?

In the past, in my “youth,” I think I would have let my frustration and desire to prove something take over. I would have let it push me to work out too soon, I might have let it fuel a reckless abandonment of my crutches before I was ready.

This time, it went the other way. I started to worry—what if I never fully recovered? What if I limped forever? What if I could never work out again? What if I never returned to boxing, the sport I love? Mostly I quashed these fears, reminding myself of what my surgeon had said. But on days when moving was particularly hard, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, it haunted me.

So yesterday, I was in physical therapy. I was doing the work and trying not to let the frustration of how much physically weaker I am today than I was two years ago get to me. Two years ago was before a global pandemic, I kept reminding myself. Two years ago you were working out five times a week. Two years ago you hadn’t had surgery and been laid up for over a month.

The doctor who oversees my therapy is an Austrian man with a look I affectionately think of as Rumpled Professor™️. You know what I mean: Wire-frame glasses, cozy sweaters, slacks, leather shoes of some variety. He’s also very matter-of-fact, which works for me—I don’t benefit from false cheer or optimism-without-basis. He asks how things are feeling, assigns me some exercises, and if I struggle he shrugs and says things like, “You’re not ready, it’s still healing. We’ll try again next week.” For me, it’s perfect.

Yesterday, he told me to go up and down a set of stairs, partly to practice straightening my leg all the way (something surprisingly difficult at this stage of healing) and partly to strengthen the muscles in my legs. I was having trouble and he looked at me and said, “The knee is fine. The problem is that you don’t trust it.”

Something clicked. The what ifs weren’t “just” fear, they were also digging out a foundation of trust in my body that I had spent literal decades building as an athlete. A foundation that had been quietly eroding without my notice. Because I had spent several years knowing the limits of my knee, the limits of what I could do because of it. I had tailored everything in my life to it—I’m hardly a big hiker because of it, for example. I didn’t attempt certain exercises because of my knee (burpees, lollll).

But the knee is fixed now. And sure it’s still healing, but I have the literal photos to prove that my surgeon fixed the problem. I can see it in very glossy high-res images, if not in my actual body.

I can also feel it. The joint isn’t perfectly healed, but already it feels so much better now than it did on December 6th 2021.

The problem, as my doctor so bluntly put it, wasn’t the knee. It was me not trusting it.

Every morning since my surgery, I’ve woken up and thought, “Okay, I need to do my physical therapy then x, y, z tasks…”

Today, I woke up and thought, “I’m going to go for a walk.”

It’s cold in LA today. It’s cloudy. It’s bound to rain any second.

But I walked, without my crutches, for almost a mile to the La Colombe near my house. I couldn’t do that without limping before the surgery! Today it was easy. When I saw the LC sign and realized I wasn’t in any pain, that I hadn’t limped the whole way there, I burst into tears. One second I wasn’t crying and the next second I was sobbing.

Because I can’t remember the last time I trusted my body to carry me that far without hurting. But today it did.

I wrote this essay from the porch of La Colombe, clutching a coffee from El Salvador in my hands and hunching against the cold.*

In a minute, I’ll walk back to my house, then I’ll get ready for work, and drive over. I’ll probably keep my crutch close, just in case. But I finally know that I don’t need it anymore. I trust that my body will get me around just fine.

This is how you build trust again. Slowly at first, then all at once.

Me, at La Colombe, writing after walking.

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As always, thanks for reading. If you want to respond, you can respond via email or leave a comment. If you’re so inclined, tell me about a time you regained trust in yourself.

Don’t forget to check out my new project, Stories. The third short story will be going out this weekend, and the third writing prompt will come out next Monday. To subscribe, come to valorieclark.substack.com > My account > check the box for Stories.

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*Yes, I think 54F is cold, don’t come for me, people-with-real-winter.