Uncompromising Kindness or Lack Thereof: How I Ruined One of My Surgeries and What We Can Learn (3)

How do we learn from our mistakes?

Do we diligently take note of the situation and deeply analyze our decisions to create a rapport of what not to do next time? Or, do we allow ourselves to move on from our mistakes, simply marking them in a file of things that merely happened?

As I come to terms with the story I tell to you, I think one thing is clear. The mistakes I made did not lie in the decision to invest my time and effort into getting the necessary surgery, but rather the lack of kindness I had for myself to fulfill a healthier holistic lifestyle. When it comes to living with a disability, I can find it hard to discern where things have gone wrong without blanketing entire contexts into good and bad. I feel a lot of energy can go into parsing through my disability journey to create a nuanced understanding of my life story. Nonetheless, here we are on a blog platform to do just that.

Using harsh language, like “I ruined my surgery”, is a knee-jerk reaction to ableist interpretations of my own lived experiences. If my surgery did not restore hearing, the surgery failed in its job. If I contributed to the failure of my surgery, then I too have failed myself in moving past my disability.

I take full responsibility for neglecting my health during this period of my life. Without taking full responsibility for my actions, I cannot move forward with other medical decisions that require great attention and care. My story, which demonstrates an inability for myself to be kind to myself, sheds light on the potential I could have if I merely embraced my health as my own.

What lessons do I hope to explore in telling you my story?

I do not have any specific hard-fast rules to live by in terms of not going down the same path. Admittedly, it may take such an event in your own life to change the tide of how you interact with your body.

Even so, I can describe how uncompromising kindness can create an atmosphere of acceptance to who we are on any day.

Uncompromising kindness requires a detailed awareness of our own thoughts, behaviors, mannerism, actions, words, and so on. As we mount a difficult task of confronting an ableist society, we can let harsh negative comments about our inability to conform populate our surroundings. One must recognize these comments immediately, and ask themselves, “was I being kind to myself just then”? If one is unable to address the comment at that moment, a time in the day to reflect on said comment can still be a powerful tool of introspection.

Being kind to ourselves may be a difficult task, and it’s not something that we can easily check off our to-do list. It is a learned practice that can take an entire lifetime to embrace its full potential. There is no guarantee we will be 100% kind to ourselves without flaw, and that’s part of the journey.

When we allow ourselves to treat our actions with kindness, and acknowledge when we are not, we create mental boundaries which affect our self-esteem and overall health.

The uncompromising part is the part I struggle with most.

As I cycle through thinking about my story, I often want to blame myself for the bad outcome, but that would be too easy. Finding the avenue to treating yourself with kindness can be unrelenting. Especially when we in the realm of disability culture can find ourselves feeling isolated from others’ experiences and not being able to relate with ourselves.

In order to embrace the uncompromising part, I have told my support system that if my inner friend rears its ugly head to remind me of the practices I have so well established. This can trigger my brain to settle down from fight or flight mode and engage with the practices I have invested myself into.

I told my story of when my surgery went wrong, but that does not have to equate to things that went bad.