Run a mile in my shoes …
“The admonition to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes means before judging someone, you must understand his experiences, challenges, thought processes, etc. The full idiom is: Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.” —GrammaristI was thinking about this in the shower this morning as my heart rate was hovering 125+ and I was trying to rinse the conditioner out of my hair before waving the white flag. Truth is I almost never use conditioner because I simply can’t afford the time. But I’ve barely taken a comb to my hair in recent weeks because I have been battling various viruses on top of the regular cast of dysregulation known to my dysautonomia.
For me, even simple tasks feel like I am doing them under a cut throat kitchen sabbatoge. I can hear Alton Brown saying … You will have to take your shower while running on a treadmill! You have ten minutes .. GO!
And that’s it really. Each ambulatory task involves some kind of unseen sabbatoge. Which means frankly some tasks never get plated. Don’t even ask how long it’s been since I shaved.
There’s simply no level of conditioning that gets you use to the autonomic sabotage. It doesn’t get easier. You don’t build up endurance. You don’t acclimate to the new normal. You simply get tripped up, fucked up, upside your head messed up … Depleted and discouraged. And those are the good days when you reached for the conditioner thinking you had enough time.
And there is no perceived control. It’s not like you can just lay down and be automagically better. Sometimes it helps, sure. But then there are the glitches like sneezing .. which I did this morning, three times in fact. Which sent a vasovagal response that kicked my pulse to 130 .. laying down. And it stayed that way for way longer than my patience and grace allowed.
So no. I don’t leave the house. I inconvenience a flurry of family every day by my dysfunction. And while it may be easy to judge from an autonomic-ordinary perspective, I would caution that the mile to walk in my shoes involves a high end pair of cross trainers tethered to the treadmill while cracking quale eggs at the stove in some parody of the movie SPEED. You can’t slow down, you can’t jump off … And after the commercial break Simon Majumdar will say your deconstructed green eggs and ham did not remind him of a croque madame and you will be instructed to return your money to the brief case and exit stage left.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
