The Healing Process

When I worked at a retail store around four years ago, I was bitten by the worker's compensation bug (not sure if I'd call the compensation a 'bite' on my part) after falling off of a ladder and breaking my left wrist. As part of their procedure, the company placed me on light duty. Being the driven hard-working individual I was, I refused to accept being temporarily disabled and continued to do my work as normal. The result of this behavior was not so kind to me, and underwent a prolonged recovery which eventually resulted in me needing surgery.

In retrospect of the current events that have unfolded in my sporadic life, I was reminded of this story by a colleague today. There appears to be a life lesson in this analogy, as it suggests that through whatever trials we face in life if we do not allow ourselves the time to heal from our wounds, we may never recover from them. The truth is, I've never been able to allow myself to heal from my most devastating experiences and they just disappeared over time - but sometimes only temporarily.

I paid a pretty hefty price this week when I took the mentality that I'm just going to continue as normal as if nothing had happened. In return, I saw many of my grades slip after suffering through a mean streak of five exams, none of which I aced. In fact, the grade that matters the most suffered a 72%. In all fairness, I had to take the exams - however, I did some analysis today and found that perhaps there were things I could have done for myself that would have made my exams easier on me.

My heart speaks much louder than my brain. More importantly, it has a clear-cut idea of what it wants while my brain is still trying to process an array of ides that keep pouring in. What this does is causes my emotions that are driven by my heart to take control of my cognitive abilities and remove the abilities to make rational and logical decisions. Because of this, I tend to make shoddy decisions when I have every reason in the world to go in the other direction. So any cognitive processing that I might have been able to use on these exams was disrupted by the clouds of emotions streaming through my brain, which is a pretty logical explanation for my test scores that in no way reflected the actual knowledge I have gained in the courses.

By this hypothesis, there really isn't a whole lot of room for a learning opportunity other than taking the necessary precautions in the future to allow myself adequate time to heal. But if my emotions are really overwhelming my brain preventing it from being able to structure a series of well organized-thoughts, perhaps there really is little that I can do about that. Or it could be that I need to consider removing myself from certain situations that might be stimulating these responses. The question then remains, what is currently going on in my life that is causing this?

Whatever it is, I'm sure in time I will figure it out. I know many people are wondering why I can't just 'let go' of things - but clearly those people have never taken a psychology course before.