🍌 The banana or the bathroom (my body made me choose)

The Short & Sweet

Tuesday I was sitting at the office trying to decide between two things: going to the kitchen to grab a banana, or going to the bathroom. They're in opposite directions, so I had to calculate whether I had enough left in me to make both trips or whether I needed to choose.

I chose the bathroom.

There's a concept called spoon theory — the idea that people managing a condition start every day with a limited number of spoons. Every activity that costs them physically or energetically takes one away. When the spoons are gone, they're gone. You don't get more. So you make real decisions about what's worth it.

I've known about spoon theory for a while. But Tuesday was the first time I felt it sitting there doing the math on a banana. And what surprised me wasn't the limitation itself. It was how much it bothered me to have one.

I had hip surgery in December due to hip dysplasia. Weeks on a walker, then crutches, then a cane. About a month and a half ago I graduated to walking without any support, and it felt like everything. One of the biggest hurdles had been losing sensation in my left thigh. I couldn't feel it, which meant I couldn't activate it, couldn't strengthen it. Every single step required me to manually think about walking and override what my body wasn't doing on its own. Exhausting in a way that's hard to explain.

But things were turning a corner. I could feel it.

Then I got sick. Just a cold for a couple days of heavy bed rest. And either lack of movement, or just by nature of being sick was enough to bring back to what felt like square one. I couldn’t fully support my weight on my left leg, even with crutches. I went to PT and even though I had been focusing on strength, that’s just not what my body needed.

It was a recovery-and-rest day. Dry needling, massage, stretches. And even though I know that's exactly what I needed, something in me resisted it the whole time. Because a rest day felt like going backwards. Because if I'm not actively fixing something, what am I even doing?

And that's the thing I keep bumping into. The fixing instinct.

I have a work trip to New York in May and I'm already doing the math in my head. What travel looks like right now, what I need to account for. That's the armor doing what it's always done.

I have spent my whole life relying on control. As the eldest daughter. As the first in my family to navigate so many things without a map. The unknown was always survivable because I could build a structure around it — create a plan, manage the variables, anticipate what I could and account for what I couldn't. Control wasn't a personality quirk. It was armor.

And now my body keeps offering me the same lesson in different languages. The layoff. The diagnoses. And now a setback that knocked me further back than I expected and left me sitting at my desk running calculations on a piece of damn fruit.

I can't control my way through recovery. I know that. I know a rest day is still a day I moved forward. I know one rough week doesn't erase six weeks of walking on my own. I know the setback isn't the whole story.

Pero knowing something and feeling it are two entirely different things.

I don't have a real solution. I'm still in the middle of it, and I think that's exactly the point. Unlearning isn't a single moment. It's a Tuesday where you choose the bathroom and let yourself be a little sad about it. And then you keep going anyway 🌿