Gratitude Exhaustion

Change is hard

My whole life, I’ve been lucky. Whenever the chips have been down for me, things have usually gone my way. Even the moment in my life which was without doubt the unluckiest - when the rocks I was climbing in Scotland shattered, causing all the protective gear I had placed to fail - I somehow still managed to be lucky. After all, I was climbing with a surgeon who is also mountain rescue trained. Had I been out with literally anybody else I know, I would simply have died. Something similar goes for the fact that the mountain rescue team pulled off an audacious helicopter operation to get me off the mountain, which would have been impossible in anything other than the perfect summer conditions we happened to have been climbing in that day. Assuming that being alive is better than being dead, then luck was once again ultimately on my side.

Since the accident, my fortune has persisted in various ways. Most recently I received confirmation that I will be getting full CHC funding once I leave hospital. As discussed in a previous post this is a big deal, because it means I will get the maximum financial and therefore care support available. I’ve also been tremendously fortunate to have the ongoing support of my parents. Although I will have to wait several more months before I am able to move in, my mum and dad have managed to secure a wheelchair accessible property in my name (provided everything goes to plan in terms of mortgages etcetera). So although I will be spending the next few months in a nursing facility, that should only be a stop-gap measure.

If nothing else, the past half a year has made me acutely aware of how dependent on family one becomes even whilst living in the heart of the NHS. If it weren’t for my mother and father, I would be truly screwed. It would have been impossible for me to single-handedly deal with things like securing viable accommodation for the future, let alone communicating with my employer and various crucial organisations during the first few months of my injury. Without my parents, I am pretty sure that a nursing home would be less of a stop gap interim measure, and more like my permanent future. As far as I can tell, following an accident like mine those who don’t have family to pick up the pieces are in the direst of dire straits.

So I’m lucky to have parents who care enough, and are competent enough, as well as being financially stable enough, to offer me serious help in rebuilding something like a life. And for this, of course, I am grateful. Which leads to a question: why then do I sometimes behave like such a shit?

Last weekend was not my finest hour. Having made the long trek down from Merseyside to the rehab centre just outside of Watford, my mum and dad came to spend time with me. And I rewarded them with toddler levels of truculence and incivility. Whilst this is not exactly new territory for me (as several ex-girlfriends would readily atest), it nonetheless does prompt some head scratching. Given all my parents have done for me, why am I not simply happy to see them? Why can’t I behave nicely, as a fitting display of the gratitude that I do genuinely feel towards them?

The answer I think lies, at least in part, in the fact that gratitude turns out to be less straightforward than I previously realised. On the one hand there is the fact that the flipside of the gratitude I have towards my parents is facing the reality of the situation I now occupy. In order for them to do what they have done for me, I have had to sign over to them legal power of attorney: effectively giving them control over my finances and all major legal decisions. In other words, they now do everything important for me. Whereas half a year ago I was an independent adult with his own income, career, projects, and so forth, I am now effectively reduced to the status of a child. I need mummy and daddy to help me with everything important or administrative in life. And this is a very difficult thing to come to terms with. Call it the folly of male pride, if you wish, but feeling like one has been reduced back to the status of a baby is hard to experience as anything other than degrading. And if one is now living like a baby, why not act like one?

On other hand is the fact that I’m now in the position of having to be grateful all the time. I am grateful to the person that wipes my arse. I am grateful to whoever washes me. I am grateful to whoever puts my clothes on. I’m grateful for being helped to brush my teeth. I am grateful to whoever fills up my portable water bottle and clips the drinking tube to me, before putting splints on my hands for the rest of the day. I am grateful to the person that brings my lunch out and puts it in front of me. I am grateful to whoever takes my cutlery from my bedside to the day room and helps wedge it to my hands. I am grateful to the nurse who puts my afternoon medication into my mouth. I am grateful to the staff in the gym that I spend most of the day with, most of whom by now have had to cope with either my piss or shit at least once. I am grateful to whoever helps repeat the feeding ritual come dinner time. I am grateful to whichever persons put me to bed. I am grateful to whoever checks my skin for pressure sores and sets up my night catheter, before propping up my iPad in a place I can see it so that I can watch some crap on Netflix before falling asleep and repeating it all  (and more) again.

The result of this is what one might call gratitude exhaustion. I spend the whole day saying please and thank you. I do pretty much nothing for myself, let alone for other people. I take, take, take, and I never give. And again the effect is ultimately  degrading. To be reduced to little more than a pitiful lump of meat, kept alive by the charity of others. Or so it feels.

To give this all some further context, it’s why I hardly drink tea or coffee anymore. Not because I don’t want to, but because doing so requires asking a member of staff to make it for me and then help me drink it. And whilst no member of staff would refuse, and I’ve been told I am more than welcome to ask, I feel no desire to add one more demand onto busy staff plates, or to be reminded yet again of how utterly useless I am. So most of the time I go without.

Which hopefully goes some way to explaining why I feel conflicted, almost embarrassed, to have received what on the face of it ought to be some straightforwardly joyful news. Some of my closest friends recently revealed to me that they have set up a crowd funder to help me purchase a better wheelchair than is provided through government services. More than this, they have informed me that the amount of money raised is really quite astonishing. We’re talking a very substantial sum, which involved them raising the initial target because so many people wanted to contribute. As a result, I will be able to buy a high spec chair that would simply have been beyond me otherwise.

And of course, I am grateful for this. I really am. Moreover, I’m humbled by the sheer number of people who have donated. But I also feel embarrassed. I’m sure that nobody who has contributed thinks of it as an act of pity, or even charity, but I’ve lived now for so long as somebody so helplessly dependent on others that I struggle to see myself as deserving of anything else.

I suppose this is really just a long-winded way of saying that I never had any idea before my accident that becoming severely disabled involves more than just coming to terms with physical incapacity. It requires a complete recalibration of how one conceives of oneself in relation to others, and indeed the social world as a whole. And this is no easy task. As my former psychotherapist told me, humans are remarkably good at change, whilst for the most part absolutely hating having to undergo it. And furthermore, meaningful change is never quick.

So bear with me if I seem ungrateful. I’m usually not. It’s just that I’m trying to learn how to be a different kind of person. And I’m finding it painfully hard and slow.