ID: The words New Blog Post in the upper right hand corner. The words Work in Progress in yellow over an orange triangle and a blue circle, in the lower left hand corner, beside the Learning to be Flexible logo. In the center is the title Abilities & Priorities.
Sometimes disability can amplify the heartbreak of losing a skill or ability. The fact remains that we all lose skills for many reasons. Sometimes it’s injury or chronic illness, while other times may be due to time or other resource restrictions. While I am entitled to experience my feelings, I can work to reframe my perspective. Thinking I am the only one working through an experience, like losing abilities, can add isolation to the pain I’m already feeling.
I have been working on graded motor imagery with a pain clinic to set goals and regain some abilities. It has been exciting to reach milestones and see progress. But it can also be upsetting to face some of these losses. I recently reached the milestone of walking a half mile. As someone who had hip surgery in 2015 and now uses one or two forearm crutches to walk, that skill felt beyond my abilities for a long time. Every time a clinic asked me to set a goal, I always said walking. Well now I have accomplished that goal. I will still need to maintain my practice of walking and will hopefully be able to continue increasing my distance and even type of terrain. I am deeply proud of the hard work that brought me to this milestone, and even prouder to be able to actually walk a half mile. But it was mixed with some difficult emotions. Celebrating the ability to walk a half mile requires you to truly acknowledge that it wasn’t something you could do before. And while I wasn’t afraid to admit that I couldn’t walk that distance before, I wasn’t letting that reality into my heart. I was avoiding the pain that went with it. This process has not only given me a chance to regain abilities, but also given me the opportunity to work through some of the pain and loss of losing those abilities.
Many people lose the ability to do something simply from lack of doing it. Whenever I complain about never snowboarding again, my sister (who I spent a childhood snowboarding with regularly) mentions that she no longer snowboards. This is a person who has run marathons in the last few years and is fairly healthy and active. I have often envisioned that my limitations are more concrete while she could ostensibly get out on the mountain again. She explained that while it would be physically possible with lots of specific exercising, it is not something she has time or energy for. She explained that she actually went snowboarding with her husband and found it to be much more difficult than she expected and complained of being sore for days. She explained that she could do it, if she invested the kind of thoughtfulness and time that I am investing in walking and playing music again. At this point she has lost a lot of skill simply from time away from it. So while it may be for different reasons, we both can no longer snowboard.
In choosing my next goals at the pain clinic, I got a bit ambitious. In addition to trying new walking terrain, I added playing guitar and piano again. I can currently play for about 30 minutes at a time. But for more than a decade, I used to play on average 3-4 hours a day, and have a degree in jazz composition. Working on setting imagery guidelines was especially challenging for me, because I had to acknowledge specifically what I can and can’t still do. For example, on guitar, I can always play an E chord, but an open F chord with my thumb wrapping around to play the low F hammer on is no longer a possibility. I am not ashamed to admit that I got more choked up than I expected. Maybe the added emotion is related to music being my longtime passion and career. Either way, acknowledging the depth of loss was painful AND an important step in moving toward my goals.
I know many musicians that have experienced changes to their ability. I just recently had a conversation with a friend where we discussed how much our daily lives have changed in a decade. As a former classmate at music school, we both used to practice many hours a day. But as someone who has transitioned to more administrative work, she admitted that she may not even sing every day. Her husband, an incredibly talented guitar player, is now a successful lawyer. I wonder how many hours he plays… a year. Whether it be something as straightforward as a broken arm affecting a drummer or something as complex as a successful career moving you in a new direction, people with all sorts of abilities experience loss of skills.
This reminds me of my ability to speak Spanish. At one point, after 5 years of study, I was able to read and write essays in Spanish, understand most conversations, shows, and movies, and spoke well enough to communicate in Spanish at work. Now after fifteen years of sporadic use and study my skill has diminished greatly. With time and work, I could regain that skill. This process, and some truly thoughtful conversations with my sister, has really reminded me that regaining skills isn’t specific to me or even to disability. Especially as we age and devote time to work, family, etc., our abilities may change as our priorities change.
Whether it's from chronic illness/injury or simply the inability to devote time and resources, we all lose skills we once had. Working to reframe it as something that is not specific to disability has been helpful at making me feel less alone in my experiences. I’d also like to acknowledge losing my ability to struggle through a conversation in Spanish doesn’t hold the same emotional weight as losing the ability to walk. My loss of snowboarding is different from my sister’s loss in that mine is related to my disability and would be dangerous for me now. But realistically, we have both lost that skill. Framing my experience as singular and myself as the victim was isolating and painful. Pretending like losing those abilities wasn’t affecting me wasn’t working either. Somewhere between those two extremes I am working to strike a balance. In part by working to digest the pain of loss alongside reorganizing priorities and setting new attainable goals. Wish me luck- we’re all works in progress.
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