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Apr 23, 2026
π The banana or the bathroom (my body made me choose)
π The banana or the bathroom (my body made me choose)
00:00
03:37
Transcript
0:00
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.
0:07
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.
0:16
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.
0:27
When the spoons are gone, they're gone. You don't get more, so you make real decisions based on what's worth it.
0:35
I've known about spoon theory for a while, but that Tuesday was the first time I felt it, sitting there doing the math on a banana.
0:43
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 in a walker, then crutches, then a cane.
0:55
About a month and a half ago, I graduated to walking without any support [chuckles] and it felt like everything. One of the biggest hurdles had been losing sensation in my left thigh.
1:05
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.
1:16
Exhausting in a way that even I've had a hard time explaining. But things were turning a corner. I could feel it. Then I got sick.
1:25
Just a cold for a couple of days of heavy bed rest, and either lack of movement or just by nature of being sick was enough to bring me back to what felt like square one.
1:35
I couldn't fully support my weight on my left leg, even with crutches. I tried. I went to PT, and even though I had been focusing on strength, that's just what-- that's just not what my body needed.
1:47
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.
2:01
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.
2:13
What travel looks like right now, what I need to account for. That's the armor doing what it's always done, protecting me. I have spent my whole life relying on control.
2:23
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.
2:37
Control wasn't a personality q-quirk, it was armor. And now, my body keeps offering me the same lesson in different languages.
2:45
The layoffs, 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.
2:57
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. Another setback isn't the whole story.
3:08
But 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.
3:19
It's a Tuesday when you choose the bathroom and let yourself be a little sad about it, and then you keep going anyway. Recuerda, control was never the thing keeping you safe.
3:29
It was just a story you told yourself to survive the uncertainty. The unlearning is figuring out what's underneath it.
Perfectamente in Progress
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