Episode 33: The Art of Recovery: Resting on Purpose

Intro & Announcements

Flourish- $300 off now through Sunday 5/17!

2:02 — Personal Journey: Breast Cancer Recovery

• Episode 31 & Episode 32
• Video of post-surgery rehearsal

7:29 — Contrasting Recovery Approaches: First vs. Second Surgery

11:43 — Embracing Rest & Creativity

• Audacity Works
• The Artist Athlete
• The Smart Aerialist Podcast

12:21 — Tools for Recovery and Creative Exploration

Connect with Fallon

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 🌐 www.inthewingsaerial.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to The Aerial Alchemist, where movement transforms into magic and stories take flight. I'm Fallon, dancer, aerialist, and storyteller, inviting you into a world where circus and dance meet creativity, resilience, and community. Whether you're here to be inspired, to learn, or to simply dream a little bigger, you found your place. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to the Arial Alchemist episode number 33. The art of recovery and how we rest on purpose. Which can be tough. Before we jump in today, one announcement. You can hear me talk about our retreat in Italy for months now. You're welcome. It's gonna be fabulous. It's June 19th through the 25th in Umbria, Italy. And we just announced yesterday that we are having a last minute sale this week. $300 off if you sign up for our retreat flourish before Sunday at midnight, Sunday the 17th. Um, so that's a pretty good deal. If you needed a little a little nudge, if you've been thinking about it, if you've been sitting on the fence, there you go. And it kind of ties into what we're talking about today because let me tell you what, we're gonna get some rest and recovery while we are on this retreat. We're gonna learn things, we're gonna do the aerials, and there will be plenty of time. Plenty of time to rest on purpose. So I hope you will join us. It's gonna be fabulous. I will put the link to that in the show notes as usual. And if you have any questions, please feel free to le reach out to myself or Leah. We're happy to answer them for you. So let's jump in. This is kind of part three, if you will, but I think it will stand on its own. But the last couple weeks I've been talking about my breast cancer experience. Um, we're in the nitty-gritty of everything the last couple of weeks. And I thought today that we'd talk about recovery. Because while I'm going to speak from my experience of breast cancer recovery and having surgeries in that sense, I know lots, lots of people, lots of aerialists, lots of dancers, lots of performers who have been grounded for some some injury or some surgery or something that's going on. So I learned a couple of things in the last couple of years about myself and about how to do recovery, or at least what worked well for me. So and what didn't work well. So here we go. Let's let's jump in today. So I mentioned that I had um two different surgeries, so and two different recoveries. Now, the recovery for both of them was essentially the same as far as like timeline and restrictions and all that. So both of them, I went six weeks with essentially not being able to do anything. I had more restrictions after the first one than the second one. After the first surgery, I couldn't lift my elbow above my shoulder. After the second one, he had released some scar tissue in my chest area and wanted me to move it. But there was no weight. There was no lifting of any weights. Um, for six weeks, nothing above like a very light walk was allowed. I wasn't allowed to get my heart rate up. So yeah, so it was just chilling. I had two very different approaches to each of these recovery periods. So the first one, it was uh I had my bilateral mastectomy with delayed reconstruction. Please feel free to go back and listen to the other two episodes if you want to know more about that. But you don't need to. You don't need to. It was a hard thing because so many things had been taken away from me so quickly after being diagnosed with cancer. And I feel like this could happen with a lot of injuries too, that it just feels like things move really quickly and you feel out of control. For the first surgery, I was really resistant to what was happening. I was definitely in the denial phase of the grief, in the bargaining phase of the grief, and just really not in a happy place. So, for that six weeks, like right before it, I was like in the air, like every single day. I put my rig up in my backyard and I was out there every single day, even though it was like a thousand degrees outside because it was the middle of summer. I was like, nope, you're not gonna be able to do this. And six weeks at that time felt like forever because I I I hadn't planned on it. I didn't want it. I was like, how much, how much strength am I gonna lose? If if you've been listening to the podcast, I had been on a fitness journey up until that point, and I was in the best shape of my life. And I was like, oh man, I did all of this work. How much of it's gonna go away? And then what's coming next that's gonna like prevent me from like getting back to my old self. And so I felt this urgency to just get back into the air as soon as I could. And I'm sure I I know I was driving my surgeon bonkers every week when I went in for my tissue expander fill. I was like, okay, can I lift anything now? Can I do squats? Like, could I do burpees? I hate burpees. And I was like, I'll do burpees. If that's what you say, that if that's the only thing I can do, I'll do them. Um, because I just wanted to move and I didn't want to lose everything that I'd worked for. And I didn't want to sit down. I didn't want to be still. Even though I do relish the days on the couch when there's like when it's when it's shitty outside, I want to lay on the couch with my dogs and just like rot for a day. But that's like a day, to be clear. And after that, like I want to move. Like it gets stir crazy and I need to move. Yeah. So there's there's this interesting thing, um, I think with performers, dancers, aerialists, that what we do is not just what we do, it's who we are. It's interesting because uh it's like that in my other life as a nurse, too. It's one of those professions that kind of becomes your identity, whether you want it to or not. I I do think that's a thing that happens. And I'm sure there's other professions out there, but those are the ones that I am familiar with. And it becomes who you are, not just what you do. And so, like the movement isn't just work, it's not just a job, it's who you are. And so when you don't have that, then what does that mean? And when it's gone, what fills that space? So I spent the six weeks the best I could trying to like stay busy. I was posting a lot of social media and like old videos, but then also doing like the talk to camera videos and like, well, I guess I'll just keep this part of of who I am going, this part of my business running. I can still do this part. And when I look back on that, like, was it worth it? Was pushing and rushing it worth it? And I don't I don't think so. I think I could have leaned into it a lot more and gotten more out of it. And I did learn that a year later. But I really just wanted to get back to rehearsals, get back to moving. And I did. There's videos of me when I was allowed to do a little bit of movement and I'm doing some ground choreography, but I wasn't allowed to put my arms above my head. So there was a part where like our arms would sing in a circle above our head as we like chausset to the side and then to the other side. So I just have my arms down and they're just doing like little baby circles. Everybody else is doing big circles, but I was doing it. I was getting in my body, getting ready for the show that we had to postpone by a year because of this nonsense. Yeah. So I don't know. That's I I'm not judging myself at all for how I handled with it. I handled it the best I could with the information I had and the tools that I had, and I got through it. And that's all I could ask for myself. So then um a year later, it was a year and change later, um, it was time to do my implant exchange surgery. So that I scheduled for one week after Ember's Pedals, Petals and Stars. So the show that we had now been working on for two years leading up to this huge show for one weekend, which is always such a wild thing, that I I had the surgery scheduled one week after that. And I was so looking forward to the break at that point. I was welcoming it. And because of the hormone therapy, I haven't slept since I've started that. Um, and so it had been at least a year at that point that I had felt like I hadn't gotten a good night's sleep. And I was like, oh man, I cannot wait for the surgery where I get a forced nap, a propofol nap from my good friend Molly. She's gonna make sure that I sleep for at least two hours. It's gonna be fantastic. And it ended up being a little bit longer than that. And I just had a fully different approach to the second surgery, a fully different mindset to it. And I was looking forward to this rest uh and blocked it out. And I was like, okay, cool. I wanna get, I wanna read for for reels this time. I couldn't get my brain to settle down enough for the after the first surgery to read. And I was like, cool, once, once the narcotics and I'm off of those, I'm gonna be able to like read some books. And I did. I was reading. And I had a little um a little routine every day, like had my morning ritual. So I get up and do my morning ritual. Um, I don't know if I had that the first time. I did not. I didn't do my morning ritual. That's a relatively new thing. So I would get up, do my morning ritual, sit outside for a little bit because the weather was still nice, and then I would um, you know, have my breakfast, whatever, read a little book, work on a puzzle. Um, and I had all these other things I wanted to like paint some more. I'm not a painter, I'm not that kind of artist, but I do enjoy doing it, and even though I'm not good at it, um, following a tour tutorial and like trying it. So I was doing a bit of watercolor and I forget, I would do a little bit of admin work, like catch up on on some of that stuff, but I kind of let that fall by the wayside too. We had just had the big show. There was no need for a big social media push for anything. Um, and I was like, that's fine. We'll just think about the next thing. And then there was one thing that was on my to-do list that I never actually got to. And I think I'll have to dive into that another day, but that was to take uh voice lessons. I want to, I don't want to be a singer. I kind of do, but I don't know that I have like the I don't know that I have like all the motivation to like do it. It's something that like people are like, oh, I wish I could do Ariel. And I'm like, well, you can't you can. Anybody can, but you have to do it. And I feel like that's how it is for singing with me, is that I'm like, oh, I want to, but I don't know that I really want to to like put in all of the time to be really good. But what I do want to do is take just enough voice lessons that I have like maybe two or three awesome karaoke songs that I can just go crush karaoke. And I feel good about that. Like, and just have a little bit more knowledge and have a different way of expressing myself, but um not definitely not turning that one into um a profession by any means. So what I found was after that second six weeks, after that second surgery, I was so much more refreshed at the end of it. The drawback was I really didn't want to go back to work. I didn't want to go back to either work, really. Not so much getting in the studio, but like the admin work that goes with owning a business. I did not want to get back to that. And I didn't really want to get back to my nursing job. I miss my coworkers. I always do. They're fantastic people, but I didn't, but I didn't want to go back to work like I did after the first surgery. I was just relishing in this like space of I was like, man, I'm ready to retire right now. Let's go. Let's go. So I just think it was, it was just a different, yeah. Like I said, a very different approach. And I felt like after the second one, I felt so much more creative because I allowed everything to like chill. There was no push to do the next thing. It was like this is the time to right now. And I think that's so needed. It's so needed. It's something that when I've been talking about the retreat and how we're gonna have the downtime because you need that. This is what I'm talking about. You have to have that time to just like turn off, put your phone down, put the put everything away and eat just stare out the window and get bored for a minute. And what you'll learn is that you don't get bored at all. Your mind will do beautiful things. So a few little tools for your toolkit if you're grounded, uh, and things that I learned. So lots of different things you can approach this. I loved having the routine and knowing what my days were gonna look like and breaking it up. So that was really like making sure that you go on your walks or whatever it is that you're allowed to do. Do your PT, work that into your routine, whatever that is. And then in that routine, you can add in different things like maybe you do want to watch some aerial con aerial or dance content, but consume it with those student eyes again. I remember when I first started aerial, I could not get enough of watching videos. And times were different back then. We did not have social media like we do now. There were very few aerial videos that you could watch, and so it was hungry for any, any of them. And now there's like 80 bajillion because that's what the algorithm is making us do is just crank out content. And that is a discussion for next week. Uh yeah, anyways, watch, watch some of them, watch new ones, search out new ones, uh, maybe a different apparatus or a different person to follow, or listen to a new podcast that is um, or new to you podcasts. There's a handful of them. I'll I'll tag some. I've talked about Audacity Works um from Rachel Strickland is my favorite. I listen to it religiously. That sounds like not the right word to describe. Audacity works religiously. I listen to it ritually every Wednesday when it comes out. I used to listen to the Artist Athlete podcast with Shannon McKenna McKenna, and I don't think she does it anymore, but you could listen to the old episodes. They were fantastic. And through her podcast, that's how I found Rachel. That's how I found several other podcasts. So that's a great one to like because I think almost all of them were interviews with other people. Yeah. Um, then there's like notebook journaling. And if you're wanting to still create, like, man, that lives in our in our brains first. So writing it out. If that's something that you're interested in learning how to do or learning my process, I'm happy to share that. How I go through mapping out sequences, what I do with my spreadsheets. They look different depending on the pieces of work, but I'm happy to share that. But write it down, get it out. Also, listening to music, getting inspiration that way, just finding new songs that I have. I think every artist that I know has a some sort of playlist that is this realm, but mine is could be a piece one day is the playlist name. And I forgot Christine has a really good one. I forget what her name is. I'm gonna have to ask it. But anybody, everybody has that playlist. Find more songs for that playlist. If you're allowed to move, doing an artist date alone or with someone else, but I enjoy them alone sometimes for sure. But going to a museum, going to a the theatrical show, whatever that looks like, going on a hike, going to a movie, um, yeah, going out and doing doing something new, something different. There's so many different experiences in so many cities now. So just but you have to find it. You gotta go seek it out. Yeah. And like I said, I had put things on my list that was like do something new or that you've been wanting to do that you haven't had time for, that like maybe doesn't take a lot of movement. Maybe you want to learn how to crochet, maybe you want to learn about somatic work, whatever it is, like just start diving into something new. Get your brain going in a different way. And it will just strengthen it will strengthen your creativity or your work when you come back to it. And let the body be what it needs to be. So even though you have that structure and your routine, maybe it needs to look different some days, and that's okay. Let it, if you need a bath instead of a shower, or you need to move a little slower one morning, or you need to just do nothing, then do that. That's where somatic work can be really great, getting used to or listening to what your body needs. So I'm looking at the time. And I've got another appointment that I need to get to, and I've yammered on about this, and I think I've hit all my points. So I'm gonna let you go for today. And before I do, I want to thank my patrons on Patreon. If you're watching this on the videos, I did a photo shoot earlier today, and you're gonna get to see some of the behind the scenes photos of that, and probably the actual photos that no one else gets to see because I'll forget to post them at some point, I'm sure, of it. So, yeah, if you want to hop on the Patreon, you can check that out. All of the posts on the Patreon are available for purchase individually, so you don't have to bind up for the monthly subscription if that is not in your realm of being able to do so. Every little bit helps. Thank you to my patrons. I could not do this work without you. Love you so much. If you have requests for future episodes, please hit me up. I'd love to answer all of your questions for you. Um, you can find me on the social medias at in the wings aerial or on Patreon at in the wings aerial. If you enjoyed this episode or any of them, I would love it if you liked or subscribed. Maybe rate it and maybe even shared it with a friend who you think might get something out of it. I would love that. But I hope you have a beautiful week and I will see you next week. This has been the Ariel Alchemist. Now go create some magic of your own. Happy flying.