The Unlikely Classroom: What Pain Taught

I am someone who solves problems through intuition and improvisation…

This made school and every kind of formal education especially hard for me.

The soil formal education uses didn’t allow these things to grow.

It crowded them out with busy work. It rejected the wonderment of honest questions.

For a mind naturally attracted to learning it would be hard to overstate the damage done.

I am only now starting to unpick the damage in a substantive way.

I am by nature an autodidact. But it was blocked.

The unblocking has been gradual, continues, and has arisen through a fierce curiousity about self.

For decades I thought in my heart that I was an autodidact but evidence was thin on the ground.

I’d buy or borrow books on interesting topics and they would remain for the vast majority of them unread. I’d buy musical instruments and they would remain unpracticed.

Sometimes I’d manage a practice session. Or a few pages.

I was radically discouraged for decades.

Then something strange and fortuitous happened. That looked from the outside like a disaster. Not the worst disaster ever, but a disaster never the less. I got a back injury.

It was a work injury, from picking up and putting down too many things with slightly wrong technique. I carried it for six months. Just taking a step would reverberate pain through my lower back.

In responding to it I spent a lot of time lying on a pilates mat at home, feet flat on the floor, knees pointing up to the sky, book under my head so that my aching lower back was pushed into the floor. This was a move I learned from the Alexander Technique.

I tried a lot of stretching too. I engaged the services of a friend who was a masseuse and also a Physio. We tried to crack it together.

I kept looking.

In my continued search two breakthroughs happened. Prompted by the pain I began more and more to watch myself at work, how I moved what I did. I discovered something subtle. When I lifted trays full of plants my shoulders were slightly up on where they could be if I was properly relaxed and my elbows were bent and they didn’t need to be. Both these things were putting unnecessary strain on my lower back.

Pain became my teacher. I was at the point where the only way I could continue to show up for work and do my job was to watch every lifting and putting down motion and to do these with relaxed shoulders and with my arms as straight as possible for as long as possible.

Work was survivable. Just. I was daily applying myself physically in a way that at least didn’t seem to be making the injury worse.

But I was working my guts out.

I continued to think about my situation and research. I was very worried that i was going to lose my job and not be able to work physically again for a long time. This cast a heavy emotional shadow.

The researching paid off: I either tumbled on the idea of strengthening my back first or discovered the existence of a gym with a local presence called Kieser with a rehab focus and got the idea of strengthening my back from there.

Kieser was a strange gym. There was physios on site. Just weight machines. Nothing else. No free weights. No mirrors. No screens. No music. Just these machines.

They assessed me and gave me a custom program. In a moment of excellent self insight given my ADHD nature I worked with the Physio to break my program into a split program with a consequence I was only at the gym 15 minutes each day instead of the more normal approach of doing a 30 minute session every second day.

When I did this I was quietly terrified that I was going to drop out of the program before seeing the benefits or even in spite of seeing benefits.

Then something super strange happened for me. I committed. And the commitment stuck. My back slowly but surely session by session begun to strengthen.

Going to the Gym every night even for just 15 minutes was still an enormous effort especially under the still continuous cloud of fear over my head. The Gym was expensive, more so than a regular Gym.

I arrived at my Christmas break utterly spent.

Some of life’s other pressures popped up over the break right when I just needed to collapse. People needed things from me.

My back however was improving and improving more.

I went back to work. But it was all to much. I don’t just have ADHD, I also have Bipolar. I was having a manic episode. The one thing I had done the previous year, which was to take no time off as a result of my back I now had to do. I took off a couple of weeks, and was able to pull out of the mania in this time.

This article is in a very different place from where it started. But guess what? This story is the story of how I first learned the embodied learning patterns I need to stick at things and to apply to function as an autodidact…

I learned so many things. That I could research and work on hard problems where the solution doesn’t come easily. That I can notice things that were subtle. That I can sustain repeated actions for a long time if I’m given the right distraction free environment. That I can take multiple passes at the same problem from different angles fail and keep trying. That I can operate under a cloud of discouragement and keep trying until I find something that works. And the surprise: I can do structure when I craft the situation around my nature for the good.