Conversation Four
A Conversation about the small, ordinary things a person begins doing differently — usually without ever noticing.
Last time we sat with something simple: you were trained to keep going, and you got good at it.
I want to stay close to that today, because there is a second half to it that almost never gets said out loud. While you were busy keeping going, you were also, quietly, adjusting.
Not deliberately. Not as a decision you’d remember making. Just the ordinary, sensible adjusting that a capable person does when something is slightly less comfortable than it used to be.
Let me tell you what I mean, because it’s smaller than you’re probably expecting.
Somewhere along the way you may have started sitting a little differently in your own chair. Leaning on one side at the sink. Putting your weight on the other leg while you wait. Taking the long way around the kitchen instead of the turn you used to make. Carrying the groceries in two trips.
Maybe you began using the handrail on stairs you never used to think about, or you quietly stopped using one particular staircase in your own house. Maybe you rub the same spot without noticing you’re doing it — the shoulder, the hip, the base of your neck — while you’re on the phone.
Maybe the shoes changed. Not for a reason you could name; the other ones just weren’t comfortable anymore, so they moved to the back of the closet and stayed there.
Maybe you started needing a little longer to get going in the morning. Maybe the same afternoon of errands that used to be nothing now costs you the evening. Maybe you wake up stiffer than you used to and it takes half an hour to feel like yourself.
None of these are symptoms, exactly. Nobody would mention them at an appointment. Most of them never even reach the level of a thought — they’re just how you do things now.
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where a Conversation like this can go wrong.
I am not telling you that you missed something.
I am not suggesting that if you had noticed the stairs, or the shoes, or the extra half hour in the morning, you would be in a different position today. That isn’t true, and I wouldn’t say it to you even if it were a useful thing to believe.
These small adjustments aren’t evidence of damage. They aren’t a diagnosis. They aren’t proof of anything at all. They are simply things worth noticing, the way you might notice that a path through a field has shifted a few feet to the left over the years because people kept stepping around a wet patch.
And I’m certainly not asking you to become someone who is deeply in tune with her body. That’s a great deal to ask of anyone, and especially of someone who has spent decades being asked to do the opposite.
I’m only asking whether, looking back, there were small things you adapted around long before you ever thought of yourself as having a problem.
Before this became something you had to think about, was there anything you had quietly started doing differently?
Here is why I ask, and it isn’t for the reason you might expect.
Nearly everyone I speak with begins the same way: it came out of nowhere. One morning, one lift, one ordinary Tuesday, and then everything was different.
Sometimes that is exactly what happened, and I take people at their word. Bodies do occasionally turn a corner all at once.
But often, when there’s no hurry in the room and nobody is waiting for a tidy answer, something else surfaces. Ten or fifteen minutes in, a person will stop mid-sentence and say: actually — now that I think about it — I’d stopped taking the back stairs about a year before that. Or that she’d been sleeping on her other side since the spring. Or that she’d already quietly given up the garden two summers earlier and never once connected it to anything.
It isn’t that she was hiding it. It’s that it never looked like information. It looked like life, and like being sensible, and like getting on with things.
What that gives us isn’t blame. It’s context. It’s the difference between a story that begins on one bewildering Tuesday and a story that has a shape — a longer, gentler shape, in which your body was working around something for quite a while, competently, without making a fuss.
And a story with a shape is a much easier thing to be hopeful about than a story that begins with out of nowhere.
There’s one more thing I’d like you to hear, and then I’ll leave you alone with it.
The adjusting was intelligent. Every one of those small changes was your body and your good sense working together to keep you doing what you needed to do. That’s not failure. That’s a body communicating in the only volume it had available, and a person responding to it far more attentively than she gives herself credit for.
You did listen. You listened with your hands and your habits rather than with words. That still counts.
If one of those small things came to you while you were reading — the stair, the chair, the shoes, the way you carry a bag now — you might set it down next to the other notes you’ve been keeping.
A few words is plenty. There’s no list to complete and nowhere to send it. And if nothing came to mind at all, please don’t go looking for it. These things tend to arrive on their own, usually in the middle of doing something ordinary, a few days after a conversation like this one.
— Tammie
Another Conversation is being written slowly, and it will be waiting here when it’s ready. Nothing is expected of you between now and then.
The conversation continues whenever you’re ready.
Whenever you’d like company again, the Conversations will be right where you left them.