Normal/Not Normal

Today is 3 weeks post-surgery, and I vacillate between wanting everything to be back the way it was pre-surgery (minus the pain, of course) and wanting to continue to do mostly nothing interspersed with bouts of inertia and moments of fugue. I started teaching a little last week, and it was both exhilarating and exhausting: I loved feeling that teaching groove of expressing exactly what I mean in clear and concise terms, and immediately afterward I wanted a quiet dark room and a cool compress, because apparently life is more tiring now that I am INTEGRATING A PROSTHESIS INTO MY MARROW HELLO.

I behave the same way around other people: when offered assistance, I counter with "I can totally do this, thank you but I'm fine," but when no hand is held out, my mental dialogue vibrates with a self-righteous "oh my god I'm exhausted why on earth would you think that I could carry a plate of food by myself."

In school last semester I learned about cognitive dissonance (or rather, I was finally given a name for it): the act of holding two opposing concepts in our minds at the same time. Our human dislike for this jarring, discomforting sensation often leads us to validate one idea over the other for the pure mental relief, regardless of actual value. "I am a regular person just like you/ My needs are special and must be acknowledged" is my dissonant song lyric du jour. I can go to the store and carry a shopping basket,  but when someone holds the parking elevator to squeeze in an extra couple and their cart, I exude irritation from my pores and shift to make sure everyone can see my cane.


F. Scott Fitzgerald said "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." I'll keep working on the function part.