Training to Win Amidst Chronic Disease Step Four - Boundaries & Solidarity
Identify that You are not Your Labels. Your Identity is not Stolen for having been granted Great Challenges. Refuse to give up who you are in the process of healing. Changing what you do is not changing who you are. You cannot remove pieces of your true self. You are simply expanding your portfolio of experiences.
A - Boundaries protect against Others’ Expectations:
Family and friends may be confused if you continue to live aspects of your life that are important to you through stages of adversity. Things you enjoy, things that fill your heart and light the fire, that fuel your Willpower. As if a serious chronic dis-ease state is only serious enough for consideration if it renders you incapable of being your old self on your best day. It doesn’t matter that the six other days of the week you may be feeling so lousy that you are for all intents and purposes dead to the world.
See most people are very comfortable sitting in the box they have defined for themselves, and happy with the box they’ve assumed the people they know are in.
People also have boxes filled with expectations for concepts and situations that in all actuality are way outside their scope of experience. When a person doesn’t fit in their box, or any box for that matter in my case -hopefully yours too- and then we also tear up those boxes of expectations for our reactions to any given situation encountered, it can be overwhelming for people. And so people around you will shut down. They will assume you are a certain way just like they always have, and that way is never the truth, it is just an opinion. And none of it is you.
It makes most people very uncomfortable to realize they don’t know something or something they thought was true isn’t. It doesn’t have to make you uncomfortable that they are disturbed by how you are, who you are, what you do, or what you say.
B - Solidarity of Purpose is protection from our own self-expectations:
Never let any one thing you are striving for be all you have. You don’t need to identify with a thing you are trying to do. I love calling myself a chiropractic student. Until the day comes I officially decide not to pursue it longer, I will continue to say it. I’ve continued practicing and learning extracurricularly in my leave of absence that turned into an official withdrawal about three weeks prior to the day I write this. My six months off is now up and my healing journey has only still just started. The whole time I’ve been training chiropractic, from the first day of school in September 2017, I have driven people away from me with talk of not just being a chiropractor. It is all they had. They couldn’t imagine a life beyond just having an office and adjusting people. On more than one opportunity I’ve had the chance to sit round circle with some of my old school’s highest performers to talk life plans, and even the most respected among them didn’t actually have any more than a vague concept.
Most of us go to school knowing what we might want to do, but without a sharp image, preference, intention, or plan for the person we want to be. I am Justin Rindner and I want to help people to learn about themselves and live more fulfilling lives.
Chiropractic is an incredible window through which this experiential growth can occur. It was never my only way. Never only have one identity. We need to learn to hold space for ourselves. Especially in these moments where what people thought you were is taken from you.
Let the unwinding begin. We don’t need to show them how much more we are. We hold on to the totality of our life’s potential by not forgetting that we are always more. Hold onto everything you are for your own sake, no one else’s.
Your shifts in the Path toward purpose and reason are only your concern. No one can tell you what you are doing is right or wrong. No one can tell you the way you do anything isn’t how you are supposed to. It does not matter if people feel sorry or take pity on you as if you have lost something by staying true to your heart. Repeat out loud: I have lost nothing. We are always whole.
You are not your title, you are not your name. You own nothing. Your clothes are borrowed, your house is borrowed. You do not own what is in your bank account. Your beliefs are on loan. Your flesh is not your own. You own only you, that is, your soul. The sentience that is transmitted through your flesh to interact with this world, and the collective experience it (you) gains toward universal love over time.
No need to fret over any detail lesser than that. And if amidst your struggle, you find yourself feeling good every now and then, please by all means go out and celebrate in the most truthful way possible. For me this year that meant more trail running and road trips that flew in the face of our adversity. And every day I had the energy to express myself, I was exactly whatever the hell I wanted to be. We all have a right to be that.
Tomorrow’s post talks about The One Thing. Today we touched on giving yourself permission to do as you please on your best day, tomorrow we fight for retaining our identities on our worst days! Don’t miss it. You are Loved now and always. Thank you for reading.