Day 086 – Guilt and Apology

Welcome to Day 86!

Today’s been a mixed blessing.  This time the visit to the physio wasn’t something I dreaded.  In fact, there was a certain amount of excitement.  My angel of pain relief awaited.  It was only a short session.  It was just to touch base to see if the exercises were working and to step it up to the next set of exercises. 

This time, the moon boot is staying at home.  Runners feel better and go on both feet not throwing out the knee or the hip.  Arrived at the physios and we had a friendly where she was caught up on the exercise regime, the pool visit, and yesterday’s swelling.  The swelling will apparently, come and go for a couple more months and is normal.  Phew!

Also caught her up on the latest exercise, started yesterday, balls of the feet on a step and pushing up onto the toes and letting the heels drop.  Just slowly and not too many times just yet.  Luckily for me, this is one of the next exercises she was about to recommend doing next.  There were some others, on the whole, I feel my healing is going well.

There’s another visit booked in two weeks’ time, which will probably be my last one.  Today, there was no need for acupuncture and only a minor massage on the few remaining swollen bits of the foot.  There was a friendly discussion on remedial massage preference (her) and Swedish massage preference (me) during the session although both have their time and place. 

When talking about the pool visit, I mentioned we had discovered one of our cats is addicted to chlorine and grabbed my phone to show his reaction.  It was just at the moment the physio said, she was going to take me into the gym to show me a couple of extra exercises to limber up the pesky sideways stiffness.  Sideways muscle stiffness doesn’t loosen as easily the muscles used for walking. To which I commented, maybe after that – thinking she wanted to stay professional and keep the half hour professional.

Then, like a classic comedy skit, I didn’t pick up on the hint and blindly followed up with (like a goose) with “do you have anyone after me?”  Truthfully, she answered no.  Oh dear! I’d trapped her – I feel so bad now.  And continued with “I’d show her to clip” after the session.  After the session she walked me to the counter didn’t say anything more and quickly walked to the back room.  It was this when the energy of the situation hit me, and I’ve felt bad whenever I think of it.    

At first, I was a little hurt by the rejection of the lack of goodbye.  However, it made me question, how I approached the situation and asked myself how the physio could have told me that she didn’t want to watch the cat video?  On retrospect, I hadn’t given her a choice.  It was innocent enough on my part, just assumed she wanted to watch a cat vid as much as I wanted to share it.  Not remembering that not everyone loves cats.  If the situation were a Osho Zen tarot card it would be the card of Projections.  It’s a textbook example, and I’m ashamed and saddened by my behaviour.  

The classic “projections” is when we you have a lovely rapport and make assumptions based on that rapport but not knowing enough about them.  What I should have done was asked if she wanted to see the video, and respected the “no”, “not really” or the more polite “some other time” rejection.  After all that’s what we teach children, ask first, respect the no.  Looking back on the situation the physio did the only thing she could do and that was run away.  It’s not like she could have said “I don’t want to watch your stupid cat video” and she was too young to say, “please don’t” or “please don’t bother, I’m really not into cat videos or clips”.  In fairness, the physio shouldn’t have been put in that position, but we all make mistakes.

My response, to the “please don’t” I would have bristled underneath and on the surface would have responded with, “oh okay, sorry”.  Thus, giving me time to exit and vent to my husband for about half an hour and moved on.

Now, I could be wrong and reading too much into the interaction, and the physio may have needed to rush off to the bathroom.  However, when I come out of a discussion and my energy feels low, it’s usually a good indicator that the energy between us had shifted.  It’s also a good indicator that I hadn’t been mindful and watched the exchange.  If I’d been mindful at the time, I would have picked up the nuance and not persisted. 

When this happens to me, I tend to feel bad.  I feel “wrong”.  The feeling of wrong depresses me.  Makes me question, if I can ever get anything right.  Then it makes me feel insignificant.  Also, like I’m a horrible, inconsiderate person not worthy of knowing.  It could keep going into greater depths of darkness and self-pity.  There’s a whole other story on this, think we’ll wait for another day to go there.

Let’s just say that making a mistake where I have unintentionally hurt someone makes me feel bad in the extreme and puts me into an existential crisis.  I used to be scared of hitting rock bottom on the spiral of self-doom now I let myself go there – emotionally speaking.  Not acting on it.  At the bottom, there’s a voice I planted there in meditations which triggers a voice of compassion uttered by people who have loved me. 

The voice says, if someone else made this mistake and realised it, what would you say to them if they felt like you do?  My reply would include any of the following advice: “don’t worry, apologise if possible.  Trust yourself to know if apologising is the right thing to do. If you do apologise, don’t be offended, if the person you’re apologising to doesn’t accept the apology, that’s their right. Your apology needs to be sincere and respectful without trapping them into feeling they need to forgive you.” 

With or after the apology advice, other advice would be things like don’t be so hard on yourself, mistakes are what we learn from, you’ll make other mistakes, and making mistakes is as certain as “death and taxes”, it’s part of living.  If everything breeds itself, then kindness begets kindness.  You can’t preach compassion if you’re not prepared to show it to yourself. The whole “physician heal thyself” and charity begins at home.  This’ll pass.  Death isn’t the answer it appears to be; if reincarnation is real it means next time you reincarnate, you’ll go through the same experience, but it will be that much harder. Yeah, apparently karma’s a bitch.  Isn’t this time hard enough already? Learn from it and move on.  There might also be a moment when my mind burst into song using the Frozen song of “Let is go” 🙂”.

Yeah.  I’ve got some work to do. Let’s see what the cards have to say.