Falling apart

[Trigger warning: grief; old age, end of life, death.]

I’m falling apart. Both literally and figuratively. My body is physically falling apart which is causing my spirit to break down and my mental health to go down the drain. 

I don’t know how much longer I can go on this way. If this is the “new normal” for me, then I don’t want to go on any longer. 

And once again, the solution is not psychotherapy or counseling or drugs/meds. 

Being an intense, outdoor athlete is part of my identity. Something that I was allowed & able to come fully into only very late in life — like the alignment between my body & gender-identity — and thus I feel a strong sense of grief as well as urge around the issue. Just as for my gender identity, I was also robbed of the fuller, truer aspects of my athlete identity for most of my life and for the best years of my life. So being able to live as an intense outdoor athlete through trail running and rock climbing means the world to me, just as much as being allowed to live in the world as the nonbinary transboy that I am. But I wasn’t able to get to the point of living out these fundamental identities of mine until I was 40 and that, apparently, was too late because now my body is falling apart. I got just over a year of joy in the body that truly aligned with my soul, just over a year of doing the activities that make me feel like I’m really alive and really me — and now it’s all over, all gone. 

A finger injury in my left hand that started bothering me during the winter holidays last year flared up on my ice-climbing trip in February so I hardly climbed at all in March; now, I haven’t been climbing at all since mid-April, for three & a half months, because of the torn UCL in my left thumb. Despite the surgery on my left thumb at the end of May and the gum surgery at the beginning of July that slowed down and reduced my physical activities a lot, I still kept running with the goal of completing my first full marathon (on trail) in October, to fulfill a long-held dream of doing a full marathon (~42 km) before turning 43. But four weeks ago I sprained my left ankle and I haven’t been able to run or hike (& hardly walk at all) for over three weeks now. So not only is one of my bigger dreams crushed, my whole summer is really ruined: when I found out I wouldn’t be able to climb all summer, I consoled myself with the thoughts and plans of trail running and hiking to keep my body moving outdoors, to go exploring, to be out in nature. But now that I’ve sprained my ankle I can’t even do that. On top of it all, an old pain in my right shoulder, that I had been able to ignore for a year, has flared up again to the point that I can’t even swim — the only activity I had left that gave me some kind of reprieve, at least as long as the outdoor pool is open. So now I really have nothing left. 

All my time is spent running between doctors’ appointments and physical therapy. The only exercise I can do is stationary bike at the gym and core/strengthening as long as it’s on the floor so as not to aggravate my ankle. It’s all indoors and it’s boring as hell. It’s mental and emotional death, if not physical death. 

When I say I need intense, outdoor physical activities I mean it. I mean “need”, not “want”. I need it because it’s part of my identity, part of who I am, and a part that I found so late — maybe too late — in life. I need it because for me it’s like meditating. I need it because it clears my mind, literally decluttering my brain. I think it’s also partly my neurodivergence (I have autism & ADHD) that leads me to need (& not “just want”) these intense outdoor physical activities: the chemicals that get activated through these activities, specifically being outdoors (& intense), keep me and my brain regulated and off meds/drugs. The level of stress and mental clutter and ever-present compression/pressure that I’ve been feeling this summer comes from not having access to my main regulatory mechanism, to something that I need as much as eating and sleeping. 

I cannot live this way. This summer has felt — and is still feeling — like a never-ending list of homework assignments and chores to try to fix my body with hardly any results and hardly any joy or reprieve. If this is the “new normal” for me, then I’m going to have to find a way to pull the plug because this way of living is not sustainable for me.