“I’m Doing the Best I Can”

It’s an old friend on the phone who repeats the phrase: “Just do the best you can.”

It’s a phrase that I repeat to myself: “I’m doing the best I can.”

These days, I need to remember that doing my best is about confronting hard, physical constraints. It is about my tendency to be unreasonably demanding of myself. It is about my frustration that something as “simple” as cleaning out the corner of a room pushes me to tears; bending hurts, reaching hurts, and lifting almost anything is a challenge.

I admit to being preoccupied with pain to varying degrees depending on the day. Some days, I smile through it as I set discomfort on a shelf in my mind and it is only an annoying buzz in the background. Other days, it is a constant companion. It sullies my mood. It turns me inward, angrily. It squeezes until I feel too small to fight back.

And yet what I want seems so straightforward, so mundane, so normal. I want to make my bed. I want to do a load of laundry. I want to organize my space. I want to be able to go to a movie and sit. I want to be able to drive more than 10 minutes. I want to go out and meet new people. I want to park myself in a café in the sunshine. I want to be freed of heating pads. Heating pads are how I get through the day.

The past few days my frustration has had nothing to do with going out and everything to do with staying in. I am trying to clear a corner in my bedroom as I face off against two moving boxes, one oversized canvas suitcase, two sizable cartons of photographs, a stack of books, and three mystery containers that I believe hold clothing. I wish I had the strength and flexibility to bend, to rummage, to lift; to sort through what was dropped in that corner months ago.

But I don’t. And I am resigned to resetting expectations. To taking small steps. To doing the best I can – even if it isn’t much.

Don’t we all struggle with something? How often do we have to accept limitations? Is that the real struggle? Why is it so much more difficult for some of us than others? Why is it that will power alone is not enough to overcome physical constraints?

This is all so much more manageable when we aren’t alone. And how frustrating it is that I wouldn’t be so alone if I could just get around! It isn’t like I’m unfriendly. It isn’t like I can’t make new friends. But I can’t connect to real people in the real world from a chair or a bed. So why can’t I will my back and shoulders and hand into healthy submission???

This last may seem like a ridiculous question, but it is what bounces around in my mind with stunning regularity. I have always been convinced that if I put my mind to something I can overcome it, resolve it, move beyond it. It is that determination that has served me well through some very challenging times.

“Just do the best you can,” I tell myself.

I think about all the times in the past when I spoke those words to deflect or defend. But doing the best I can is a different matter these days. It is not a conviction held in the face of a dispute over time management (juggling work and home life), or keeping the kitchen clean (in routine relationship friction), or even in an exchange with my kids over how they experience my performance as a single parent.

This is not about learning from ineffective or misguided behavior. This is not about reminding myself that I’m stronger than I think. This is about a hundred tiny battles against pain every damn day. Reaching for a coffee mug. Picking up a tea bag wrapper dropped on the floor. Turning on the faucet and filling a watering can in order to tend to my houseplants. Showering, drying my hair, getting dressed.

I tell myself to be grateful. Grateful that I can work at my laptop again, which wasn’t a given for months. Grateful that there are days I can take a walk and enjoy it. Grateful for the crepe myrtle I can see from a transom in my bedroom, its hot pink blossoms within view even now. Grateful for heating pads.

I do it all though my “all” is the minimum of the “nothing much” of daily life we take for granted. And I tell myself that it can be so much worse. It has been so much worse. I have had my share of fights with chronic pain before and won. I tell myself that things will get better.

Patience. This is a word that I also repeat to myself, aware that I will have to enlist assistance for everything that remains to be done and I don’t yet have people to call on for that.

Then there is the patience I need for four-month and six-month waits to see a doctor, countless phone calls trying to coordinate communication between various offices within the same health care system, a task reasonably assumed to be on the provider rather than the patient, and spinning my wheels, spinning my wheels, spinning my wheels.

Patience, I tell myself.

Patient. Patience. The irony of these two words — their similarity, their interaction — is not lost on me. The latest political discussions of health insurance rarely seem to address the access to, adequacy of, or quality of care, regardless of coverage.

For now, I focus on one corner. Only that. Among other things, this tedious process of clearing certain specific areas is necessary if I am serious about bringing a professional organizer into my space, so that he or she can actually see my space.

For the second day in a row, I resort to pushing the pain limit with the aid of Advil, knowing there will be long hours of limited movement (and heating pads) that follow. This is a trade-off. Progress for pain. I resolve one stack. I empty one box. I see a patch of floor and I’m pleased.

This is a morning of hearing my friend’s voice in my head. Repeating his words. And assuring myself that I’m doing the best I can.

 

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• Is This It?

• Rethinking Personal Best

• “You Are Stronger Than You Think”

• There’s No Way Around It. I Need to Be Professionally Organized.