so I was doing appeasement behaviors at the new PT and I was saying that my old PT told me not to do anything that hurt more than a five and that's baby bullshit but I did skip my PT exercises two days last week because I started doing them and they hurt more than a six so I didn't make myself do them.
and he didn't yell at me. he said that a five or a six was a good stopping point and if exercise was ever making the pain worse, I should stop doing it.
and I was doing appeasement behaviors about how when you're a kid in PT they don't say that to you, they tell you to push through it. and he was kind. and.
it wasn't my PT who said that when I was a kid. I remember my elementary school PT. she was calm and kind and sensible and she talked to me like I was a person. I took the school bus with her daughter when I went to private school.
that was my parents. whenever I told them that something they were forcing me to do was painful, they said good! it's good for you!
I told my dad that I couldn't get up after the yoga class they made me take, that I had to lie on the floor while the beginner ballet class filtered in and croakily promise I'd leave in a minute because I couldn't move yet.
good! my dad said. that's what exercise is supposed to feel like!
(I don't think he routinely exercises until he cannot physically stand up. he thought I was being hyperbolic)
when I was in fifth grade, which is one of the years I saw the sensible, kind PT, I had lyme disease. my gym teacher, another sensible, kind woman took me aside when I was cleared to go to gym again and told me to sit out as many activities as I wanted and listen to my body because lyme disease is really hard on your joints and I had to be careful.
and like an idiot, like a child, like someone who trusted adults wanted the best for me, I told my parents she had said this. my mom respected this gym teacher. she'd been the one who realized the girl in my brother's grade was having the pediatric stroke and saved her life.
my dad scolded me like I had done something wrong. I hadn't sat out any activities. I'd just considered that I could. I was just telling him someone told me I should.
"don't you use your lyme disease as a crutch! I don't want you to sit out a single activity." lazy again, spoiled, trying to get away with it.
I guess the very smart gym teacher only knew anything when she was talking about other people's kids!
crying in the shower, crying over something that happened twenty-three years ago. crying because I was surrounded by kind adults who did their best and I was doing PT exercises and I know I wasn't self-reporting my pain because I watched myself, a thirty-four year old adult, lie to a physical therapist who had just explicitly told me to tell him if something hurt.
he just told me! and he said "does that hurt?" and it did and I knew what he wanted me to say because we had just discussed this.
and I said "I can't really answer that question" because if I told him how much it hurt, he might tell me to sit down and then I'd be sitting down in PT, which Isn't Allowed.
it wasn't totally conscious. I wasn't having this whole thought. but I knew it hurt and I was scared to tell him it hurt because he might tell me to stop exercising and that would be Bad somehow.
and if I'm doing that now in my thirties, what was happening when I was nine and ten and eleven and I lived in their house and didn't know I had cerebral palsy?
and I feel like I owe that elementary school PT an apology for making her look bad when I was trying to explain myself to my adult PT. that's not fair.
but I think she would forgive me, actually, if she knew. I remember her being kind.
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