Things Hospital Taught Me | Dans l’hôpital

Disgust and eye-rolls aside: I can’t quite be the same anymore. That’s dramatic. It feels silly to say, but it’s true. Hospital taught me patience, grit, and to be gentle with others. It taught me the power of my own mind, and the necessity of guarding my energy and emotions. I am continuing to learn how to detach from the yuck stuff and keep myself calm, connected, and open to the good. I want to distinguish this from the faux yogi wishy-washy bullshit, because this is not that. I’m just grateful, and I’m working on my thoughts.

Rainy Days and Mondays

When you come home after a miserable, rainy day and you’re drenched head to toe – it’s kind of like, damn. You’re cold; you’re wet; your teeth are chattering. You can feel, sense, touch it. What now? You can opt to suck in the misery of the chill, the stinging, dripping, numbness and mope. Or, you can take a moment and go hmmm. What do I need? Whip on the heater, strip off the heavy, soaked clothes and dry off. You can do both, pick one of them, or you can do neither. The point is not what you do, it’s how you think about what you’re doing.

I can’t come away from this experience with anything but gratitude. I’m cringing at how cliché I sound, and I feel like the sentiment is lost without spoken emphasis, but I’m writing anyway. My message and my experience feels too profound to me not to document it, and it’s too critical not to share. I know I run the risk of sounding like an absolute crackpot, but I’m so done stressing myself, and worrying myself with things I cannot control. It is alarmingly unproductive and energy-sapping. I realise I cannot escape stress, and that society is set up in a way that makes us all feel like hamsters on a wheel, but I’m going to actively bring mindfulness, meditation, and gratitude into my daily life in a tangible way.

The night after I got into hospital – post-ambulance shenanigans, shock, and all that jazz – I wrote a poem. For whatever reason, the words came out in French, and I just went with it. Now, I have never to my knowledge written a poem in French before. If you’ll excuse the mistakes* (French speakers & language teachers spare me pls) I wanted to share my words with y’all.

The melodrama in this piece is high. In part because I wrote most of this when I was in a peculiar state of mind, but stylistically I kind of like it?

Also, p.s. it sounds wayyy better in French. I tried my best to make the translation pretty though x

*I’m only training to teach French up to Y10, so don’t even worry ’bout it. 😉

Who knows, maybe I’ll whakamāori this toikupu later on. I haven’t decided. I just feel lucky though. Not everybody gets to come home. Not everybody gets the love and support they deserve when hospital gets lonely, boring and depressing. Aroha mai, aroha atu e te whānau whānui.

Thank you to everyone who reached out, in any and all forms. You’re cool. You all make me feel so fuzzy. Kia piki te ora ki a tātou. Kia whai kaha, kia tau te ngākau hoki. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa, nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.