A bee and a window.
It got to the point were I could no longer tell if she simply couldn’t get out, didn’t want to get out, or was just plain stupid.
For more than a half hour I’d been trying to shoo the little bee out the back door. We are bee keepers, and get very attached to our girls (all the worker bees and scavengers flying around are girls… in case you thought I was simply girl-bee biased). I actually spent two hours the winter before last warming up a wee little cryogenic one that had fallen on the snow (who knows why she was out and about??). Yes, I revived her and let her hang out in my terrarium until it was warmer outside. But that’s not the story I’m telling here.
This summer afternoon a bee had presumably followed me inside at some point earlier in the day after harvesting zucchini, and was now frantically trying to get back outside. I think? The door to the backyard was wide open only a few feet away from the double-wide window in the sitting room, much to my cat “Baxter’s” delight. (He was off in the garden somewhere, certain I hadn’t seen him walk past me…I was busy.)
The darn little bee simply wasn’t getting the message. And as much as I did care about her, I’ve been stung enough times around happy bees to know that an angry bee isn’t interested in making friends, her savior or not, so I couldn’t simply catch her and move her. She needed to put in the effort because I couldn’t do it for her. No amount of trying to sweep her out with a book got the job done. Nor did any amount of vocal “shooing” as I pointed to the open door. (Though to be fair, I didn’t really expect that tactic to work.)
She wasn’t methodically planing her escape, she wasn’t asking for help (that I could tell), and she wasn’t trying new approaches. She just kept banging her head full speed into the glass window.
That summer afternoon was nearly two years ago now. I’m older with more grey hair, and more scars, and more bees. But never mind those details- all but the last one simply bug me.
Ironically, three days ago a friend who gave me a lift to the marina told me I’m being a bit like a bee smacking into a window. No joke, and no, he didn’t know my story about the dumb little bee.
Had we been texting, he would have messaged: SMH.*
And I would have replied: SOSO.*
(* since all inter-human communication is becoming digital I thought I would practice.)
Rehab from my femur fracture and the accident wasn’t going very well. My bone had long-since healed. But while I should have had at least a year of rehab left to get the torn muscles strong and cooperating, I now had at least a year plus a month, because I kept overdoing things and giving myself additional injuries.
Remember my post about 6 months ago titled “When REST is a four-letter word”?
So, yeah.
We laughed about it as I completely and undeniably admitted that I was indeed a bee smacking into a window over and over again. And how REST (wow I hate that word) was actually my open door.
Little did he know, though, that I wasn’t oblivious to the bruises on my forehead from hitting the panes. I’d actually been working on this very issue with my therapist for 3 solid weeks. And it had taken $240, 3 50-minute sessions, and an estimated 84 hours of introspection so far trying to figure out why I still did what I did.
Most importantly, I had to realize I was running from something rather than to something. A podcast I listen to routinely had recently featured an athlete who pushed himself past injuries in the Q & A part of the episode, and the hosts asked him what feelings he was running from.
They may as well have been asking me the question, singled out from amongst the 17 thousand viewers YouTube showed as having watched that episode so far.
What looked like motivation and diligence was, in fact, fear and anxiety. I used my desire and need to “recover” as a way to mask and twist my OCD to make it look more like discipline to the untrained eye. My fear over loss, inability to fathom a life with more “withouts”, feelings of helplessness, and near-complete loss of established identity from not being able to walk well, run at all, garden, or do most of the things that I felt made me “me” was keeping my nervous system on high alert, threat mode 24/7. And along with that came the obsession with pushing myself, and desperate attempts to control the narrative to make myself feel safe.
What it did not come with was a sense of peace, reassurance that God had this under control, or ability to reason through my rehab and tune-in to my body’s cries.
I’ve written several posts about what happens when the nervous system goes into overdrive and the amygdala takes over (amygdala hijack), rendering the frontal lobes (the rationalizing and reasoning part of your brain) temporarily disabled. Unfortunately for the little wee bee, and for me, by the time we are in fight or flight mode (literally for the little one at least!), it’s nearly impossible to pull back and change tactics. You just gotta wait it out and hope for the best, with as few reminding scars as possible. Then,
actually try to learn from your mistakes.
I’m gonna crash into the window again. Very likely today in fact. And, I am certain there are areas in your life where you continually keep on keeping on at the same stupid things hoping that somehow what happened before won’t happen again.
Oh, but it will.
That evening after I was called a bee smacking into a window I continued to work on a post titled “When tomorrow never comes”, about how you have to make changes in life now, to actually see a difference between your yesterdays and your tomorrows. I was speaking more broadly to habits in life that need to be broken or learned, goals we hope to accomplish, and changes we wish to see happen for ourselves.
And yet it didn’t even occur to me that, by continuing to push myself past pain and do too much rehab, I was actually doing exactly the same thing. (I was obviously too busy running into the glass to realize this.) The only difference was that, rather than not making changes at all to progress, I had taken the changes to progress myself so far that now, to make progress, I actually needed to change and make myself try to change myself less!
Finding freedom, growing, accomplishing goals, or becoming a better version of yourself isn’t always about what you are not doing and need to do. Sometimes it’s about what you are doing that you need not to do. Either way, if you can’t find your way out, or things are not changing as they should, it’s very likely you are running from something and somewhat blinded to your own insanity.
Stop being like a bee smacking into a window. Stop. Focus. Think. Breathe. Pray. Listen. Plan.
