learning to mediate pain

I spent this week fluctuating between being in the worst pain of my life to working through some of the most interesting school work I’ve done in a long time. I am writing while exhausted, so I cannot bury the lead and take this post on a meandering adventure. I am recovering from a root canal (yesterday), week’s long battle with a dying and infected root, and all while taking the amazing 40 hour Basic Mediation training course from the Atlanta Justice Center (more later). Two things can be true at once, it was the worst week and best week on record.

Best week – intelligence, community, new pathway

Talk about a good-intense and well organized training on mediation!

1. It was a 40 hour class on basic mediation, many hours of role playing with amazing people from all over the country (1 from Italy),
2. Many hours of sharp and neutral listening while complainants and respondants chewed through their arguments
3. Hours of lectures on laws, procedures, vocabulary, and
4. Wonderful films from the late 70s, early 80s on the different mediation types and approaches.

Best week lesson:

Mediation is part of my path.

Learning about mediation as a career shift fits so well into what I’ve been doing for almost my entire career and especially with Empathy Lab as a community/team builder. As artificial intelligence takes a late-stage capitalism anti-human hammer to research and design jobs within technology paired with a culture and administration that is against DEI, empathy, and compassion, I’ve needed a change. My skills have always been human with human, never human over human, and mediation allows me to flex and practice these skills with people that actually need them. Every single human gets in a disagreement with another human, yet we have created a culture against resolution. Either we gossip, grit, live in misery, and bare the disagreement OR we lawyer-up and file lawsuits where lawyers are usually the only party that benefits. I can help a few of these human with human disagreements find some light, retain some relationships, and move on with their lives. This has always been my goal, through industrial design, user experience research + design; help humans live better lives, together.

Worst week – pain, drugs, my energy is finite

And then…the horrid-intense and incredibly chaotic war with my tooth (#3).

1. 24/7 test of my pain tolerance and where I wanted to put my energy. It was definitely a top three in my life pain, above the testicular torsion I experienced a couple years ago.
2. Grateful appointments scheduled – but the wait between them was living hell!!
3. Learned many lessons about how I can combine over-the-counter and prescription pain meds to get through the night. Learned a paranoid-induced lesson with hydrocodone and how much Greek yogurt a single human can consume in a day.
4. Crying uncontrollably in the shower so I don’t scare my family. I don’t think it was the pain, I think it was the energy exhaustion of trying to hold myself together for so long in front of others. It takes energy to participate!
5. Using all my energy to be on camera for mediation training and laying on the floor in the fetal position while I am not on camera.

Worst week lessons:

Drugs: Acetaminophen (Tylenol) doesn’t do anything for me – it’s a false hope of relief that never comes and leaves me slobbering on my pillow. Ibuprofen is my friend. Hydrocodone is NOT my friend – I started to freak-the-fuck-out. Deju vu of the accidental devil’s dose that landed me in a hospital a couple years ago.

My energy is finite.

This is the most important lesson by far. It was hard for me to understand how much I took my own ability to power through, under, over, and around everything until I was systematically stripped of my ability to perform, to help, to support, to produce, to talk, and almost to take care of myself. For a few days I was a husk of myself, shaking in pain as the infected root pounded down my spine. It took all my energy to get up and eat breakfast, walk to the office and set up Zoom, sit up at night and do my homework, and converse with my family over dinner. I am on the other side, my energy is building as the pain recedes, and I am determined to have a new appreciation of my energy.

I pour so much of my good energy into people, things, and experiences that don’t need it, don’t deserve it, or don’t respect it. Just because I can create abundant amounts of capacity doesn’t mean that I owe it to those that cannot do the same. I will share, yes, but it is not my job to fill others. I am going to start pouring my incredible capacity and beautiful energy into a life that I want to be in, a life that is enjoyable because I’ve put myself into it. I will no longer pour into those that just accepts me or expects me to do so.

My energy is finite and for me to share with special, loving, respectful, thoughtful, and reciprocating people. Those that get my energy beyond that, pay me! The first person that gets my energy must be me for a change.

I mediate differences, drugs, and energy.