I scraped some skin off of the palm of my hand a couple weeks ago.
And when looking at the red raw skin I thought about how we recover from so much, how amazing the human body is.
Our bodies can endure so much, go through so much and heal from so much.
Within days the cut began to heal, new skin grew were the old skin was gone.
But even though I was aware that the cut fully healing would take a while for some reason I still expected it to be fine within a day. The disconnect between the human body and the human brain on healing continually fascinates me.
Our brains always think we’ll recover from something quickly. If we get injured we want it fixed as soon as possible and start to get impatient when it's not healing as fast as we like it to. We get this idea that we don’t have time to wait around and for it to get better we just want it to be fixed to get back to the way life was before it was broken.
I wanted my hand to get better fast so I could back to activities I liked and hold my phone without this niggling pain and discomfort of regrowing skin.
I think it’s because we know we’re resilient but underestimate what a trauma to the body can do. And in that way I mean physical and mental.
We expect that when things happen to us after a certain amount of time it won’t affect us anymore, but what I’ve noticed is that the time we give ourselves to recover is consistently inadequate.
How many times have you said in a year I’ll be fine, In a month I’ll be fine. And how many times has that not been true.
We underestimate the timescales of our own healing.
We think it’ll be fixed as fast as possible to get back to normal. But whatever you’re recovering from takes time. Healing takes time.
And in that time we learn to adapt. To do things in new ways, to find a way to make recovery easier as we go through the time it takes to get to the end result.
Which always makes healing worth it.
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