When my colleague takes me to work, she drops me & ALL my belongings out of the car outside our office building. She then drives to the carpark up the road. This is an incredible kindness by her so I don’t need to contend with the awful wind tunnel that often surrounds the building. However, the other day, when she assembles my walking frame, the front left wheel doesn’t seem to work. It seems unable to glide into the foyer as usual and we soon realise the entire front wheel is dislodged – the screw holding it together has fallen off.
In a parking zone, I persuade my concerned colleague that I’lll be fine on three wheels. She reluctantly takes off the wobbly wheel and carries my bags to lessen the weight. Poor thing feels bad leaving me, but I assure her that I’ll be fine. I manage to hobble to the lift, hopefully disguising my thoughts of panic slamming around in my head.
The panicked thoughts begin with: “I can’t function without this frame!”
Then I start catastrophizing, “How will I get to my meetings?” “When will I have time to order another?” “How will I get home?” to “Trying to balance like this is only throwing out my muscles on my left side and I’ll now have to organise another physio appointment!”
As I arrive to the office, my other colleagues notice me enter the office in my lopsided manner with only three wheels,
“I’m fine” I lie. I just want to cry.
The day has only just begun. “I’m doomed” I thought.
However, in those first 10 minutes all my colleagues were by my side. One grabbed coffee, the other carried my laptop and belongings and the other temporally secured the wheel. My support worker arranged to collect my spare walking frame from my garage and brought it to my office. The frame company organised to send a new frame for free to my home the next day.
All my panic was alleviated due to my support system that stepped in to help me.
So often we encounter unexpected obstacles and understandably, we begin to castrophize and panic. In those moments, we all have a choice of what thoughts we tune into.
On this occasion, I confess, I let my negative thoughts engulf me and in doing so, the more I focussed on them, the more they multiplied. I let the event zap me and I felt more thrown, tired and beaten as a result. But in hindsight, I need not worry.
Next time you feel thrown by an unexpected situation, perhaps choose to tune into the more helpful thoughts. Although, it is healthy to can recognise that the situation isn’t ideal, we can choose to not let our feelings about the event worsen the issue!