[View the story “Conversation with @amichetti and @reidau1” on Storify]

Conversation with @amichetti and @reidau1

Storified by Adrienne Michetti· Tue, Apr 09 2013 07:28:24

A few years ago, when I injured my ankle for the first time, I learned a few unpleasant truths about myself:

• When I’m not active, I put on weight. Not a lot, but enough to not fit into my clothes. 
• This didn’t use to happen. I used to never exercise and never worried about weight – EVER. I used to be that girl you hated because she never had to worry about it. I used to never understand my weight-obssessed friends. (Getting older sucks.)
• Not being able to be active, and therefore not fitting into my clothes makes me depressed REALLY quickly. 
  • Fact: within a week of being confined to my apartment and under doctor’s orders not to walk farther than 4 blocks, I had slipped into a cynical and self-pitying depression.
• This affected my ego greatly — actually up to that point, I don’t think my ego and I had ever had such a blowout as this. It was a full-on war. 
• I’m afraid of growing older and/but/yet I’m trying not to be… and … I am possibly not succeeding at that. 

So, re-injuring the same ankle as I did in 2010 has put me in a pretty foul mood. I’m trying not to let it get the best of me. I’m reading this right now, and so I’m trying to just see this setback as something I can learn from — I shouldn’t have been so over-zealous about my fitness regimen, I should have listened to my body better, I shoudn’t exercise just to prove a point, etc. etc. I am trying to turn this into a learning moment so that I can grow as a person and … maybe even an athlete.

But it’s really REALLY hard. 

:-/

So please bear with me. I don’t want to slide down that slippery slope again, because it was most unpleasant. I’m getting teary and blubbery just thinking about it, writing about it right now, because those memories are painful. And I’m embarrassed and ashamed that this is how I feel about it all… but I have to say it because the whole purpose of this blog project was to document the truths I encounter each day… and so here I am.

Truth: I hate the fact that I’m 38 and not 28. To be fair, I don’t always hate that fact, but today I do.

Truth: I don’t know how to not hate that fact when I’m injured like this.

I can not hate it — heck, I can even embrace it! — when I’m feeling great and I’m active and blahblahblah, but I seriously have a LOT to learn about how to embrace it when I’m feeling like shit with my ankle on ice because it hurts to walk to the f*cking kitchen. 

So if you have any ideas on how I can embrace that when I’m injured and immobilized, please help. Reading materials, video, cognitive behavioural therapy exercises, journaling prompts… what have you, I am OPEN because I know intellectually that simply being angry and fearful and depressed about it isn’t helping. Neither is pretending that I’m “fine.”

I would really like to shed the shame of this and move past it, because I also know, in the grand scheme of things, that a sprained ankle is not a big flipping deal! I don’t have freaking cancer, I’m not dying, it’s STUPID. I know all of this, and yet I don’t know how to stop feeling this way… but I want to not feel this way because I know how STUPID it is. 

Am I making any sense?