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Audacity Works
Audacity Works
Coming back to aerial after an injury
In the course of this episode, we plunge into the emotional whirlpool that accompanies physical injuries. It's not just the body that needs time and care to heal, the mind wrestles its own battles. Often, the emotional struggle of feeling ‘less than’ before an injury outweighs the physical ones.
I'll give you some suggestions for altering your perspective during these little jaunts through Mordor, I hope they serve you well.
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
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Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you. Welcome to Audacity Works. I'm your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 44, in which we are going to talk about returning to aerial work after an injury. But first some news and then a beautiful story that I just wanted to share with you. The news part is that the Audacity Project, cycle 25, is enrolling. Next week. It opens. Enrollment opens to the public. If there's any room left, it's already open to the waitlist. That waitlist is closed. So if you've been looking and you've been waiting, look out Monday, keep your eye on your inbox and you should be on my email list if you want to know about the Audacity Project, because you'll get all kinds of emails about it. We begin our work on September 18th and we're only enrolling from Monday through Friday next week, the 4th through the 8th of September. So on to the beautiful story that I wanted to tell you.
Speaker 1:So the second episode I ever recorded on this podcast was called Use the Good China, and it was all about how you shouldn't be saving the China for special occasions. You should just use the China all the time, and it's, of course, a metaphor for your ideas, either for your creative work or for your content, or for your job or whatever it is. Don't hoard your best ideas, use them. Use them and let them develop. And that concept was taught to me by my uncle, bradley, who gave me a vintage tea set that had belonged to my grandmother or my great grandmother and said by the time I die, I want you to have broken all of these because you need to be using them. So that's where the concept came from.
Speaker 1:And many years later, when I married Manflesh, my uncle's partner, matthew, bought us these beautiful Sera wine glasses. You know, it's the kind that you only buy two because they cost a buttload of money and they're like so thin, like paper, except they're made out of crystal. They were just beautiful. And a few years later actually that's not true Within the year we had lost Matthew. So these glasses became even more precious to me, so precious, in fact, that when we moved across the country, from San Francisco to Charleston, south Carolina, I packed them up like surgically well and put them in a box and made sure they were safe and sound. And you know what happens when, like you put something in a safe place, yeah, you don't ever see it again. So for years I looked for them. I couldn't find them. And then I found them and I'm like, oh my God, it's my glasses from Matthew and I unpack them and I put them in the cabinets and mostly I use like cheap wine glasses that you get at I don't know like Goodwill or something, because I break things a lot, but those are there as well.
Speaker 1:And we had a couple friends over for dinner, my good friend, vanessa. What's up? Vanessa, I love you. She knows exactly where the wine glasses are. So she went and she was like, oh, are these new? I'm like, actually they're not new. And she started to pour herself a glass of wine and I was telling her about the story and you could see her eyes kind of get big and she's like, oh my God, I'm sorry, I'll put it back. And I'm like, no use it, use the good China. And she did. And the next time they came over for dinner and she opened the cabinet and got it out without a word and it made me so happy because I don't care if they get broken. If they get broken, they're going to be broken in service of us spending time together and having wine together, and that's what they are for. So if they get broken, in service of that OPA, which kind of ties into the subject matter that we're dealing with today? So this was a request from my girl, cora. Thank you, cora.
Speaker 1:Cora said I was wondering if you had any advice for returning to aerial after injury. I get a lot of overuse injuries that tend to linger, because when I get back on the silks I really want to be exactly where I was and when I had to rest. I've gotten better over the years, but still push too hard too soon and struggle with ego while I'm trying to recover. Don't we just know the name of that tune, cora? So we can start here with a very specific approach, because what Cora is talking about are overuse injuries that tend to be happening to her on repeat, and an overuse injury is indicative of a systemic flaw in training, and until that kind of systemic issue is identified and another solution found, then the overuse injuries are likely going to continue to happen. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we can figure out what the weak point is in the training system that's set up, then we can start to prevent those overuse injuries from happening in the first place as well.
Speaker 1:This is where I'm going to say obvious things like go to your physical therapist and do the exercises that they give you religiously. Don't just do it until you know it starts to feel kind of okay, like do it, do it until they tell you, hey, you've graduated from this exercise, that's great. But obviously like getting top notch help from body workers or medical practitioners or whomever that you see and that you trust with your body. Don't try to self diagnose, especially if something's happening over and over again, like pay someone else for their expertise to help you solve this problem. So the point of obvious advice number two bodies like to heal on their own time. They don't really care that we have a gig coming up and or that there's like this retreat coming up that we want to do. They don't care. They are just trying to repair themselves. The tissues are just trying to repair themselves and they need time to do that.
Speaker 1:I have said it before and I'll say it again it's hard to be part of a training aerial is not training aerial. It's just really hard to like make yourself do other things like, oh some gentle yoga, yeah, but you know it is helpful and there's no substitute for rest. So if that's what's being advised to you, please rest. But so, obvious advice aside, like, go see your doctors, do it, do what they say, do your physical therapy, rest, etc. Let your body take the time that it needs. But besides that because I really feel like the meat of chorus question lies elsewhere, particularly in what she tells us about just really wanting to be back where she was before the injury. So she pushes too hard because I just got to get back there and then I can begin again. But I have to get back to where I was before before I can actually move forward again, which is a very understandable way of thinking about things. But I think that we can improve on it because it's also a kind of an American way of looking at things, like, no, always more, further, more.
Speaker 1:I have been injured a couple of times and each time, like the physical stuff was really hard, you know, and it was painful and I had to rebuild my muscle tissues and sometimes the PT itself was pretty painful, but the physical stuff was a piece of cake compared to what I had to go through emotionally to cope with the fact that I felt like I was so much less. I just felt less than I had been before. And this can be especially hard when you're in the studio and I don't know, maybe you're doing your like little PT exercises like a good human and everyone else is like throwing their big tricks and they're having a great time and they just seem impervious to the war that you're fighting on the inside of your skull. But the truth is that For a physical artist, injury is a significant opportunity to learn about yourself. Or, as Bradley would say, it seems you have an opportunity to learn Because injuries, particularly overuse injuries, because there are impact injuries, you know, when there's a percussive event or maybe you like yoink your shoulder too hard, you certainly can learn something from that as well.
Speaker 1:But when it's a chronic injury that's happened over a long time, that's information for you from your body. It happens when the body stops asking, hey, I need something different than you're giving me and it's like, well, not, they didn't listen, so now I'm going to demand it, just like that thing. That happens when we know we're pushing too hard, like in our lives, we're working too much, we're not sleeping enough, and the body will let us do that for a while until it's just going to get sick. And it's just going to get sick and you're like, okay, well, you don't want to slow down, I'm going to make you slow down, bitch.
Speaker 1:So being injured is an opportunity unlike any other to get to know yourself and to learn some things about yourself that you might not like very much, but that are very, very useful to know. Like what are you? What else is there in you as an artist when your usual fun and games are no longer possible for the moment? What else is there? It really shows us what we're made of when we're hurt, and I know personally I have often not enjoyed the things that I learned about myself when I was injured, but that doesn't mean that I wish I didn't know them. I'm always glad to know more things about myself, even if they're unflattering. This is why, when I meet an artist who has been injured and come back to their practice, particularly if that's happened over and over again, the overwhelming feeling I have towards them is immense respect, because that shit can be like Mordor.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I want to suggest here is that if you find yourself in this position and you need to come back to training, your knee jerk responses might not even be accurate. They may not even really adhere to your true value system. So let's look at that, because our knee jerk reactions can be I'm behind, I'm missing out, I'm less than I was before. I need to hurry, hurry, hurry and get back to where I was before. Then I can consider what I'm doing, progress and those things, if you look at them really closely under a bright light, are fallacies.
Speaker 1:So I would want to invite you to examine your true beliefs about what it means to be injured and what it means to go back to training, rather than feeling some kind of shame around it, as though you did something wrong and it's a moral failing on your part, because injury happens, happens to everybody. You know it's not uncommon. It's actually extremely uncommon for injury not to happen. So can we shift our perspective? Because there's no changing the situation like an injury is an injury. It's not going to go away faster because we want it to. It's going to take as long as it takes to get past it and to get back to your creative practice.
Speaker 1:So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about thinking about that being part of your journey and about learning that terrain under your feet, like where so many have gone before you, because you are not alone. Many people have felt this terrain under their feet as well. They're feeling really similar things to you, and what does that feel like? What does it feel like to be a part of something that you didn't even really know you were missing out on because you just considered it a bad thing? I mean, it's not a great thing, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It always sucks to be hurt, but entering into the land of healing and recovering from an injury and making use of the wisdom that you get when you're on that journey, that's pretty profound. And, yes, you'll need to take on board the things that you've learned about yourself physically and about your creative practice so that, hopefully, we can prevent further things like this in the future not forever and like it's probably going to happen again, because if you're doing extraordinary things with your body, you need extraordinary circumstances to support that, and you know, when you're doing risky things, injury happens. It's fine. So here's another little reperspective for you, because our knee jerk response you know the egoic response that we have when we come back to aerial or any other physical creative practice after an injury is to like, try and push. You know, like Korra said, push too hard, too fast and the injury sticks around because you're just trying really hard to get back to where you were, because you think of where you are now. Compared to where you were before the injury, you're like well, I was better before, I was stronger, I was more than I am now, and that's also a fallacy. It takes a hell of a lot more strength, fortitude of character and wisdom to come back after an injury and do things in ways that are going to be healthy and sustainable for your body. It takes so much more strength to do it that way. So, learning where that healthy line is for you when you're on that journey back into your training, I hope that you find that place and that it makes you feel like fucking Yoda, like you have achieved maximum spiritual creaminess because you learned things, took on that information and have the immense strength of spirit to listen to those things instead of go hard and fast and harm yourself.
Speaker 1:Now here's another thing that I want to point out. There's a hidden gift in being injured which is different from being sick, because when you're sick, like you know, your brain doesn't work and when you're injured, depending on what the injury is, hopefully you still have full access to your cognitive abilities, to your creative abilities. So there is so much to being a working artist, so much more than the physical practice, so much more. And generally we prefer to focus on the physical practice because it's fun and we know what we're doing like, we know how to train, we know how to rehearse. But what about all the other parts of being a working artist, the concepts, the journaling, the websites, the contract writing, the costume design, the sitting and staring out the window and dreaming about what is in you? That needs to be said next. And those things take time and we don't usually give those things time because we'd rather go train. Well, guess what? You're hurt, you can't train. So you could conceivably exercise the rest of your creative brain and dive into those aspects of your artistry.
Speaker 1:And finally, something that I know you've probably heard from me before. I'm going to say it again. I'll probably say it more in the future this idea, which is very understandable and very natural where we think I just I need to get back to where I was. I need to get back to where I was. Only then can I move forward. But there is no back to where you were. It doesn't exist. That person is gone, that version of you is gone. You would have to kill brain cells and become more stupid to get back to where you were. So you don't actually want to get back to where you were. Also, it's not possible. You're here where you are now, with this brain, with this body, with these things that you've learned. There's no going back from that. And where you are now isn't less than where you were then. If anything, it's more, because you have more information, you have more lived experience. All of these things are helpful in your endeavors and of all the things that I have learned in a lifetime of exercising, is that you cannot move forward at all unless you consent to being exactly where you are. When you accept your present circumstances and you accept the moment, you accept this current body exactly as it is right now, this moment, and you accept that this, this is where we are, then it is possible to dream bigger, to move forward, to aspire to your ambition.
Speaker 1:It is just, it's just no joke how injury tests a person, and not just the physical stuff. Like I said, it's a piece of cake compared to what we have to go through emotionally to reconcile all of this stuff that comes up when you're injured. So, finally, I want to bring it back to the wine glasses. And you know what if they get broken and you? And so what if you get a crack? You know, in service of the thing that lights you up, if you get a little bit broken while you are in service of the purpose that you've dedicated your life to, I can think of worse ways. So, like the good China, like the fancy wine glasses, use them, use yourself, use this body and if it gets a little cracked and banged up, in the service of that that you love, I can think of worse ways.
Speaker 1:Looking at the time I'm going to wrap this up, I want to thank you. I want to thank you Cora especially and, of course, going to be in my next cycle so I get to know her better. And thank you everyone for listening and let me talk into your ears, and a special thank you to my patrons for making this possible and making so much of what I do possible, and more in bigger ways. I'm very grateful to you, always so grateful to you, so thank you for listening. You can always reach me on Instagram at Rachel Strickland Creative, or on Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative. So go out there, use the good. China, know that. Where you are now, this is your life. This is your real right now. This is what is true and that's way better. It's better than you were before. It's more than what you were before. Don't go back to sleep.