On being patient when you’re a patient.
Be careful what you name your webinar.
A week after being a panelist for the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) webinar, Life Happens: How to Manage Your Capacity During Transitions (an utter delight), life happened, and I needed an unplanned surgery (an utter bummer).
My talk, Before You Say Yes: Accurately Estimating Your Capacity (When Work Is Only Part of the Picture), walked through a custom tool I built to help you see how a potential project will affect your life. Especially as I recover from an unpredictable, capacity-cratering event, I have a renewed affection for controlling what’s controllable. When you can get a clearer sense of what to expect, why wouldn’t you? It helps you serve yourself and your clients better. If that sounds intriguing to you, you can check out the recording (free for ASJA members, $20 for the public) or comment below, and I can send you my resources.
For now, my own expectations need to take a major downshift.
As I sit here in PJs struggling with the stamina required to type this over several days, it’s hard to believe that just a month ago I was doing things like wearing blazers and asking New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli a question at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference (thank goodness Kevin Ridder took the above photo so I have proof that version of me exists).
Not only do networking and speaking need to take a backseat for now, so does writing. Since I’m not in a position to write a new essay this month, I went into the archives and found a perfect past essay for this moment: “Healing Takes Time. Why Do We Act Like It Doesn’t?” (originally published on November 26, 2024).
I know I need the reminder. Maybe you do too.
A week or so after my first of two arm surgeries this fall, I began to return to my life.
Despite a brief fear that I’d never again have any ambitions beyond my couch, it turns out that about a week of the sofa lifestyle was enough. Even with a bum arm, I began to engage with the world beyond my living room.
I couldn’t do everything, but I could do some things. I drafted last month’s post. I sautéed some seitan. I started walking to pick up my two older kids from school.
One of my favorite parts of school pick-up is seeing people I don’t live with. Like a lot of folks, the pandemic taught me to cherish these weak ties. When I returned to my life and small talk with my arm in a sling, I began to field polite inquiries about how I was holding up.
One genre of this question stood out. It went something like this: “Is your arm better now? Is your pain gone?”
This kindly line of questioning felt completely absurd. I could see, plain as day, that my incisions — still held together by 13 stitches — hadn’t closed. According to my surgeon, this was totally expected one week post-op. Of course, my arm wasn’t better! Of course, my pain wasn’t gone! Healing from surgery takes more than a single-digit number of days.
And yet.
I recognized the line of inquiry. It rhymed with questions I’d been privately asking myself since I’d grown bored of the couch. Why wasn’t I doing more? What was wrong with me?
All these questions reflect a shared misunderstanding. These queries imply that healing should be brief, linear, and total. Once you’re unwell, the clock starts ticking. There is a time you’re allowed to be other than your best. After the buzzer goes off, it’s back to baseline.
Healing Takes Time
But healing takes time. It’s probably more time than you’d think and almost certainly more than you’d like. That’s just the way it goes.
I remember being surprised when I learned during the pandemic that a normal, non-COVID upper respiratory infection can linger for weeks without it being a troubling sign. I’d surely had dozens of my own multi-week viruses by the time I encountered this fact, and it still floored me. It surprised me again this September when, after feeling terribly ill for just one day, it took an agonizing three more weeks for my heart rate to stop spiking during exercise and my energy to return. Despite our collective amnesia, healing taking time is actually the normal state of things.
Healing Doesn’t Always Bring You Back To Your Before
It’s also normal for healing to not return you to your old baseline at all. Some health issues stay, becoming integrated into new normals.
Even emotional health challenges can change you. Six months after a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, I remember tearing up in my therapist’s office. On top of my grief over the baby girl I’d imagined holding in my arms, I’d had a difficult emergency surgery, impacting my fertility and sense of safety. I’d lost a lot. My therapist at the time wondered aloud why I was still upset. The lack of wisdom in her question startled me out of my tears. Crying behind closed doors about a life-altering event wasn’t a problem. It was grief. Grief comes and goes. It changes you. That’s its nature.
The Science of Impatience
Research on impatience during waits suggests that by underestimating how long healing takes, we’re setting ourselves up for frustration. In one series of studies, researchers asked people how impatient they felt as a waiting period progressed. In various real-world scenarios – waiting for U.S. election results, waiting for the COVID-19 vaccine, waiting for a bus – the results were the same. People said they felt more impatient closer to the end of the wait.
While elegant, the results aren’t shocking. I can easily locate myself among the impatient waiters in these studies in exactly the situations described and many others. For instance, during the years when my husband and I were trying to conceive, I still remember how I checked my online medical chart with an increasingly agitated frequency when I knew my pregnancy blood tests were about to result.
To Increase Patience, Adjust Your Expectations
Both experience and science suggest that our collective miscalibration of healing’s timeframe adds unnecessary pain to the already taxing experience of healing. If we expect healing to be quicker than it is, we enter impatience mode sooner.
Healing takes a while. Its endpoint is ambiguous. We’d do well to adjust our expectations to accommodate these realities. One practical way to increase patience is to tell yourself the wait will be a long one – better to overestimate than underestimate, experts told the digital magazine Psyche.
Small talk on the playground and elsewhere gives me a chance to recognize how normal underestimation is and plant a flag for a more generous, true timeline. I can say, “I’m not done healing yet, but that’s normal.” And when I repeat this aloud, I’m telling myself something important, too: Recovery has its own timeframe. Accepting that truth can be its own form of healing.
New Article Alert
Your smartwatch already tracks your sleep and heart rate, but could it really see a bipolar mood episode coming? Science says maybe. That’s according to one of three new studies I dig into in my latest article for bpHope. The other two investigate what works when lithium falls short and which bipolar meds might be fogging your thinking. Read more: Bipolar Research & Insights: Lithium, Brain Fog, and Wearables | June 2026.
Book Recommendation
10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation and Making Your Own Life Easier, by David Yeager, PhD
Last summer, my oldest child entered the age range that psychologist David Yeager, PhD, studies. Yeager is an expert in motivation, so when I heard his talk at the 2025 American Psychological Association convention, I immediately put his book on hold at the library. His thesis: Humans age 10 to 25 are wired to crave status and respect. Kids and teens get a bad rap for some of the dumber behaviors that craving leads to, but Yeager argues that the wiring itself is actually pretty smart. And he has a lot of clear ideas (several of which immediately improved my parenting) for working with, rather than against, that wiring.
Recommended for parents, coaches, teachers, mentors, and really anyone who wants to support (but is occasionally puzzled by) adolescents.
Browse more books on my Bookshop | Read more reviews on my Goodreads
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