Well, the subject line makes it sound like the restless legs are gone. They are not, but the way I want to talk about them is changing.
The blood panel came back, and there’s nothing in it to do anything about. Which is a bit of a disappointment because low iron would have been the easy fix. These results give me no indication of what direction to go. So I’ve made an appointment to see the specialist again.
For three weeks now I’ve been calling them snakes.
“If you’ve never had restless legs, picture a few dozen snakes crawling around inside your legs, and the only way to quiet them is to move. So you move. And then you do it again. And it feels awful.”
That’s the image I used. It’s also the thing I want to look at today.
We think our language describes reality. And it does. But it also creates our reality.
A snake isn’t unpleasant. A snake is a threat. A predator. Something that could hurt you. So when I call the feeling in my legs snakes, I’ve put something dangerous in the bed with me, something I need to get away from. And then I tell myself it’s awful, and now the whole night feels like an emergency.
The legs would be the legs either way. But to use that script internally is to reinforce that what’s happening is fairly dire. Extreme language produces extreme emotions.
This is the same thing I wrote about the first two weeks. The legs are here, and the blood panel didn’t give me a way out of them. The suffering I stack on top of them, though, that part I have a role in.
And one of the biggest levers I’ve got is the words I choose.
I can’t pick a smaller sensation. I can pick a smaller word.
Try this: this week, catch one extreme word you’re using on a hard thing. Awful. Disaster. Always. Never. Then try a smaller, truer one. “This is awful” becomes “this is a rough stretch.” As for me, I think I’m going to retire the snakes. It was a good image, and it was never quite telling the truth. They’re just restless legs. I can handle restless legs.
Reflect on this: what’s a hard thing you’ve been describing in its most extreme terms, and what would it cost you to say it smaller?
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