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Why was the Krabi flight different? Why was it creating fear in me?
As you know, about 6-7 months ago, I injured my knee which did not recover well and I ended up basically injuring my whole right side. I also developed planta fasciitis in my right ankle. It culminated in my back seizing up which left me bed-ridden for a couple of days. Since then I have been slowly recovering — beginning with just walking as my ankle was sending shards of pain up my leg. The cold in Melbourne made it much worse to recover.
A plan was made to head to Cochi and get some help to recover from my leg injury as well as reboot myself (all of which I have written about in previous posts). The heat and evening walks in Cochi were definitely helpful but I still have a weakness in my right leg. When I was in Singapore, I increased my walking distance, which was good, but walking has a limited range of motion. So I still have weakness in my right leg.
All this was trying both physically and mentally, but I could not help myself and focused greatly on the physical. I have come to accept that it will take a while to get strength back and I have to get something more than walking happening. So I am taking measures to do that. Its going to take a while and I have to accept that.
The mental impact, however, is another beast — a two-headed beast.
The first impact is how one’s physical limitations change one’s sense of what they can do. When you cannot trust your legs to move in a predictable way, then it changes how you see your path into the world. Since I could no longer trust my legs, and was clumsy when moving, when I am out in the world, I feel exposed. A child running across me, or someone stopping suddenly in front of me — I might stumble, or worse fall. Or if the ground was uneven or slippery, I do not have the mobility and flexibility to deal with that. This meant that every excursion to the outside world had a significant level of stress and anxiety. Thats the beginning of the fear.
The second impact is the emotional state that comes with seeing one’s world as limited and dangerous. Since every step in every excursion into the world requires a calculation — what is the best path, does that look slippery, is that person in front of me going to stop suddenly — it wears and wearies. It starts to eat into the sense of self that one has — you are now defined by what you can do and where you can go. At times, I am not sure how limited the physical actually is versus how limited I think the physical is. Its a strange conundrum that hards to resolve.
What does this have to do with the flight to Krabi?
Everything.