Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon collection, trying my hand at various forms of crafting and getting better at them, and of course also learning everything I could about all the technology all around me felt amazing¹. And that never stopped, rather the opposite: Nothing gives me more dopamine these days than going down a shiny new rabbit hole, absorbing new knowledge like a sponge does water, and then putting it to use right away to work towards acquiring a new skill or solving a problem. Lifelong learning, broadening my understanding of the world and acquiring new skills to then use to make or do something myself² are a huge part of who I am.

I think this is why it baffles me that much how readily people will take every shortcut they can to avoid having to actually learn a new skill or gather knowledge about a new topic. Plenty of people are only interested in the results, only want to be able to say “I did this” without actually having to do all the legwork.³ Maybe out of fear to fail, maybe out of laziness, maybe out of perceived necessity in our capitalism based hustle culture.

And while I’d say that the current genAI craze with all its promises to achieve results without having to put in anything beyond a more or less well defined prompt certainly has made this approach to life more visible, it was always there.

In the end, I just have to accept that not everyone gets a rush from learning something new, as sad as I find that. I just wish that the consequence of this fact wasn’t having to drown in a neverending wave of slop 😐

I went into this knowing that I’d be immobilised for a few days, that I’d need crutches, that there’d be pain and also several weeks of physical therapy following the surgery. What I did not expect was how utterly impatient I would be with myself.

See, this was the first surgery I ever had as a conscious person. I did have two minor ear surgeries as a toddler, at two and four years of age, and while both of them make for my earliest (and quite scary) memories, I don’t have any feeling on how long recovery took, what it entailed and so on. And in any case, that wouldn’t have allowed me to judge what I was looking at with a knee surgery anyhow. I had read up on this of course. How I could expect full weight bearing of my leg by day two or three, and how I was even encouraged to try to really use it again right after. That there would be some swelling for a few days. In my mind this resulted in “I’ll be back on my feet with everything working in no time”.

Colour me surprised when I woke up from anesthesia to a ridiculous amount of pain, the inability to lift the leg, swelling beyond expectation and the information that there had been a so far undetected meniscus tear that had since scarred over. And thus began a journey of self discovery 😅

What this experience taught me has been eye opening. It turns out I have next to no patience with myself. Consciously I understood that the knee would need time to recover, that the swelling would not come down one day to the next and that I’d have to give myself time to heal. But at the back of my head almost immediately I started judging myself and falling short of my expectations. Here I am, a week post surgery, and feeling bad for still preferring to have my crutches in reach even though the leg is fully weight bearing again simply because walking without them feels utterly unstable and outright hurts too after one too many attempts at pushing myself. Here I am fretting over the inability to achieve full motion in the leg again even though it has gotten better day after day and I have been taking small milestones all the time. And here I am growing increasingly annoyed by my general reliance on help.

This surgery made me discover a new flaw for good that I had suspected to be there for a long time. I’m utterly impatient with myself. I have absolutely no problem with other people taking all the time they need to recover, to heal, to work through a problem, but when it comes to myself I have such high expectations that I’m absolutely bound to fail them and get frustrated by that. I’ve pushed myself through bad times before - my mental health did not thank me but yielded and I made it work somehow. My body however is not taking this kind of crap from me and showing me some strong boundaries right now, and that is an utterly humbling learning experience.

I wouldn’t say you should get yourself a knee surgery, because frankly this experience so far sucks a lot. But if you do, take it as a chance to practice patience with yourself. It’s what I’m now seeing myself forced to do and it was long overdue.