Letting It Happen

Somehow, despite my instincts, I'm managing to basically ignore my staples. I'll clean them and make sure everything looks okay, but other than that, I'm doing my best not to mess with them. When it comes to healing, it's really best to just leave the cut alone and let your body do what it's going to do. Don't pick at it. Don't prod at it. Don't bother it. Just allow the wound to heal.

I'm not good at this. I spent quite a lot of my adult life just ignoring things to the point where they got really out of hand. Past that, I started trying to actively fix stuff, doing my best to be active in the process of making things happen. It feels like the responsible thing to do. Whenever the issue with the taxes happened, I got on it. I pay my bills the same day I get money. I try my best to be on top of any and all things that are happening.

That just isn't an option when you're healing. You have some basic options about what you can do, but very little past that.  Everything that happens in the way of progress is a natural part of your body. You just have to step back and let it do its thing. It's a hard lesson to learn, especially when you've worked really hard to not be passive about what's going on in your life. However, it's the quickest way to get healing to happen.

Is there an analogy in there somewhere? I think so. When it comes to therapy, I'm certainly more of the 'focus on the positive changes' instead of the 'keep rehashing the old emotional wounds." When I first started getting help, a lot of the stuff that had happened to me was discussed in detail. It was good to talk about it, but after a while, I started understanding that just talking about the past wouldn't make things better if nothing else happened.

So I'm doing my best to keep my surgical wound clean. I'm keeping it as guarded as I feel it needs to be, though I'm trying to do that less and less each day. I don't want the arm to get babied past the point of it not functioning properly. I'm changing the bandages on my wound from my drain tube,because it's still leaking fluid, but hopefully in a day or so, that will stop as well. Beyond that, I'm just letting it heal.

I have to trust my body knows what to do here.