We can do hard things, but we don’t have to make them harder.

Or, when self-care looks like a stairlift.

I eat hard things for breakfast.

This is an actual thought that buzzed through my brain last week like a race car while passing other people complaining about circumstances I’d love to be in. The thought was like a lead foot on a pedal. It only served to position myself in front of others. I may not be winning at life, but sometimes I think I am winning at suffering more than most people.¹

I might swallow several hard things before I even change out of my pajamas, but that doesn’t mean I have to chew bricks all day. Sometimes I notice myself taking big bites out of the bad dishes life has served me, and I wonder. Maybe I could send the dish back. Could I order something else? Maybe I could make some coffee to wash the bitter taste of bad things down.

I wish I was one of those pretty white ladies on here writing snarky, spicy editorial essays about the state of society and its intersection with self-care. You know the kind. They make you laugh but also almost drop your phone into the toilet while reading because the urge to stand up and clap is just so strong. (Who is still pretending we don’t read 50% of our substacks from the throne?)

Alas, I can only write with the material I have. And this week’s material is less Harris/America’s Dad vs. Trump/Hating Cat Ladies and more Human Body vs. Hard Things. I trust you can make the leap between my legs and your heart. Don’t take that the wrong way.

Today, I want to talk about the hard work of actually caring for our selves in hard things.

We can do hard things, but we don’t have to make them harder.

As I write this, a kind man in a ball cap and navy blue collared shirt is downstairs loading my house full of large parts to install a stairlift. Upon needing to accept the reality of having a stairlift, I learned about a search engine for social services support called Aunt Bertha. We shall henceforth refer to this as my Aunt Bertha Era.

I eat hard things for breakfast, which means I also mince miserable things into jokes to throw back like those tiny dessert shooters they serve at certain fancy restaurants. I’ll take my sad with a side of gallows humor, thank you. Aunt Bertha has big plans of teaching at least one of our dogs to use the stairlift, because I believe both the world and my eyes need more gifs like this. And you better bet every friend who comes over will be offered a ride on my stairlift for the small price of bringing us a meal. I am going to get my money’s worth out of this thing—laughs included.

I kid, because if I don’t, I will spend the whole day crying.

Last week I shared with paid subscribers (linked below) that I received bad news from my orthopedic surgeon about the six month follow-up scans from my bilateral knee surgery in February.

Read more of that [far less humorous] essay below:

Hope is too heavy to hold.

I’ve had a second major knee surgery at Mayo Clinic on the books for months, because I knew that I was in way more pain than I was supposed to be if my first surgery had been “successful.” My surgeon had warned us that stopping the progression of bone death in my body would be a challenge. Between living with Lupus and a genetic blood clotting disorder, it’s hard to restore blood flow to bones that are already necrotic.

August 22nd has loomed large on the calendar. Like any self-respecting overcomer, I’ve filled the stretch of time between two major surgeries with a small but significant fraction of how I imagine Olympian Ilona Maher trains and trolls her body shamers. That is, I have shown up as my full self. From PT to the lap pool and the pages of a new book—I have newly toned legs and 51,000 words in my next manuscript to show for it.

I had secretly hoped the intense pain I’ve continued to experience every single day was pulled from the pages of Harry Potter. Perhaps you remember the story. Harry falls while playing Quidditch and the Asshat Fraud Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Gilderoy Lockhart “heals” his broken arm—only, his spell actually just removed all of Harry’s arm bones. In the next frame we see Harry in bed in the hospital wing, and Madam Pomfrey sets a large skeleton shaped bottle on his bedside table with a label reading Skele Gro. “You’re in a for a rough night, Potter,” she quips. “Growing bones is a nasty business.”

I know my sensations like a potions master knows lacewings and bat spleen. That is, rather well. Bone death is a gnawing pain like no other. I knew it by sensation long before I had more scans. I’ve known it since the first few days I started walking again six weeks after surgery…But I wanted to be wrong. Growing bones is a nasty business after all. Maybe the pain of bone regrowth is eerily similar to the sensation of death.

Well, I didn’t get my Harry Potter moment, but I love myself for wanting it.

God bless the secret little part of our hearts that hopes beyond hope. Bless the person inside us who still—despite so many defeating experiences—sees their life as a place magic is possible. Bless the parts of you and me that remain enchanted by hope.

Back to the Human Body vs. Hard Things:

There comes a time in life when bath bombs and swedish massages are a whole world removed from the self-care you actually need. I take multiple baths a week like any queen should, but no excessive bathing can make my bad knees less bad. No lavender latte can lift my limbs twenty five or so feet from the base of my stairs to the top where both bed and the bathroom are. Sometimes our lives demand a liturgy of care far more practical and pestiferous than the ladies online with silky smooth sheets and voices sell, with discount codes, of course.

My original plan for the surgery I secretly hoped I could cancel was that I would have one leg drilled into at a time, so then I’d at least have one literal leg to stand on at a time while recovering. Last time I did this, I had to recover from surgery at my parents’ house 11 hours from home, far from my spouse and friends and dogs, because total non-weight-bearing is a task of enormous commitment, requiring ramps and help bathing and problems one only gains enough imagination to solve after their calculus becomes enfleshed. In other words, I did not want to have to go through that hell again. My surgeon, being a pro, strongly recommended that I purchase special forearm crutches long before surgery, “to practice” going up and down my stairs on one leg.²

For a moment, if you would humor me, please form a mental picture of a child playing hopscotch, hopping on one leg, naturally. And now picture that hopscotch happening at a steep incline. With a set of forearm crutches added, for funsies and safety. And now, also imagine that the person jumping on one leg at a considerable incline is a not-tiny adult, jumping on a bone that is quite thoroughly dead.

I tried getting up with my right leg. I tried hopping with my left. It hurt so bad I cried. Before I got halfway up the stairs, I knew it wasn’t safe. Not in the slightest. (The last thing I need is to add a traumatic brain injury to my laundry list of complex diagnoses. Nope. I’ll pass.)

But I eat hard things for brekkie. So, next, I tried scooting my extra-padded ass up and down the stairs. This is about the point in the endeavor when my husband arrived home from work.

“Well, let me show you the situation,” I told him. “You know how I had high hopes for my crutches? Welp, here’s how unsafe it is for me to crutch up and down the stairs.” [Insert comical but sad demonstration scene here.] “But, look! I technically could scoot up and down on my butt. I just would probably have to limit my trips downstairs and outside to twice a day. For fourteen weeks…”

This was the moment I broke, or perhaps more accurately, that my pride splintered off my body like a large piece of wood that was weighing me down.

“F👎🏼ck. I can’t do this myself…Just because I can do something hard, doesn’t mean I should. This wouldn’t be good for my mental health. This is neither safe nor kind to myself.”

[Big sigh.]

I make a declaration. “We have to get a stairlift.”

Reader, my husband and friends have advocated for this choice for nearly a full year, ever since almost dying forever altered how one and then another leg functioned. I resisted it like one of those people in the middle ages trying to outlive the bubonic plague. No, thank you, I will block this out with a huge bird beak hat. I didn’t want to fully see what was in front of me, in fairness, because at every stage of this saga I have tried to hope that my body could overcome whatever first broke inside her one summer ago.

With my best crutched plans crestfallen at just two weeks before my surgery date, I pivoted hard and fast. Within minutes, I figured, if we have to go as far as renting an f-ing stairlift, I might as well get the hell of recovery over in six weeks with both legs instead of one at a time in 14. Within two days, we figured out how to make our two story, all-bathrooms-on-the-second-floor home temporarily wheelchair accessible. Let me tell you, companies on Amazon have thought of nearly everything—I don’t even have fs left to give if you judge me for supporting Bezos. Within two days a foldable metal wheelchair ramp arrived at our doorstep.³ The next day, a stairlift company assessed our house. Never underestimate the creative power of a woman in pain who values her wholeness.

I needed to reach the limits of my resistance in my own time. I needed to choose this for myself instead of having it forced on me.

The stairlift has felt like a symbol of struggle. And, it is. I won’t pretend the reason I need a stairlift at 35 years old isn’t sad. But you know what it’s also a symbol of? Self-compassion.

I wrote the second half of this essay from my immunologist’s waiting room, where a woman rolled up next to me in a mobility scooter and traded war stories with me. I have damage in both my shoulders and wrists from AS and Lupus, so wheeling myself around everywhere for six weeks straight again isn’t just going to be inconvenient;⁴ it’s going to be extremely painful. Now, I’m gleefully envisioning myself scooting through our neighborhood park as soon as my post-op pain lets me out of bed. I’m ordering the same scooter as her as soon as I hit publish here—because it’s yet one more choice I can make to order my life around goodness instead of gritting my teeth through grief.

The real queen Glennon Doyle wrote in Untamed:

“We can do hard things’ becomes my hourly life mantra. It is my affirmation that living life on life’s own absurd terms is hard. It isn’t hard because I’m weak or flawed or because I made a wrong turn somewhere, it is hard because life is just hard for humans and I am a human who is finally doing life right. ‘We can do hard things’ insists that I can, and should, stay in the hard because there is some kind of reward for staying.”⁵

The illusion that life was supposed to be easy shattered many years ago for me, but these days, I am imagining a life where doing hard things includes making things easier whenever my heart and wallet and community can allow it.

Just because we can do hard things doesn’t mean we have to do them the hardest way.

What if the hardest thing is not enduring the pain of our lives but being willing to ask for help shouldering the burden?

What if self-care includes recognizing not just what your body can do but what your mind and heart need to endure hard things without being hardened?

As for me, after I saw my immunologist and got the twelve vials of blood drawn that he wanted, I toasted the death of this iteration of my stubbornness with a dear friend over margs and tacos and made my way back home. I got on my brand new⁶ stairlift for the first time and made my own magic. (Do not miss the video proof. 👇🏼) I’ll do this hard thing melding sadness with smiles, one day at a time.

—KJ

PS Talk to me/each other in the comments section below. What does self-care mean to you today? Name one or two ways you are trying to care for your soft body and beautiful heart. Sometimes we need examples to imagine more for ourselves and our communities.

1. I recently wrote a poem about this, “The Suffering Olympics,” and now you know it’s autobiographical in all directions. I can compare and compete with the best of us, even if connection is my most driving desire.

2. In retrospect, I am pretty sure this was his tactful way of telling me my plan wasn’t going to work without being the bearer of said bad news.

3. Purchased by friends who wanted to help us out. 😭 Having multiple surgeries out of state in a year and having a buttload of life-threatening diseases makes life rather expensive.

4. Well, and it probably isn’t just temporary. This surgery is a bit of a Hail Mary for saving my bones and preserving my mobility. I detailed that more in my essay for paid subscribers. Let’s just say this saga is far from over.

Hope is too heavy to hold.

5. Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 85. Affiliate link, so you can help fund my scooter and/or book addiction. While we are at it, order a copy of my latest book: https://amzn.to/3X0U3qo

6. Rented. For now. Using our HSA. Long term, I probably need to own it, but we do what our wallets can.