EP I. - Self-Reliance Principles (I. & II.)

What Nietzschean’s lessons can a paralyzing back pain teach you?

Introduction - Broken glass ball

About a week ago I posted a note from the hospital.

For several years I've been trying to balance out my two biggest passions - writing & bodybuilding. Since the beginning of this year I’ve been struggling to keep up these two glass balls in the air while also juggling a third one - my time-demanding full time job in finance.

In the true Nietzschean spirit I’ve been pushing forward trying to “max out” on each of these areas of my life. But so it happens in life that even the best focused juggler loses the rhythm for a brief moment from time to time and one of the glass balls falls off and breaks into pieces.

This time the glass ball was my health.

Being about 7 weeks into a new diet with the Nietzschean “Diehard” mentality I was pushing my body to its limits pushing off my well-needed rest day until “someday later”. Sure enough, my body calculated all the accumulated fatigue over the last weeks of training, multiplied it by the overtime in my regular job and by the anxiety that I haven’t been writing as often as I should be, and gave me a nice red bill - a paralyzing back pain.

Long story short, after about fourth training in row with no rest in between (admittedly dumbly scheduled - one simply doesn’t do an upper body/lower body split 4 days in a row - but such is the nature of unrestrained ambition) my lower back gave up. Completely. I wasn’t even able to stand up without help, let alone walk. So I called my best friend, Martin, (to whom this article is also dedicated as a sincere Thank You letter) who drove me to the hospital.

Neuro Department Arrival - A lucid nightmare

On Sunday night when we arrived at the hospital. The back pain was getting worse every minute and since the Neurology department was in the second storey I quickly realized that I’m not about to make it up there on my own. So Martin helped me out of the car into the wheelchair and drove me up to our supposed “rescue point”. Oh what a naive assumption.

On the side note I never even imagined myself in a wheelchair before. And though on the way up to the Neuro Department we were laughing and sarcastically joking about the absurdity of the whole situation (a 30yo “bodybuilder” in a wheelchair) a veil of fear and anxiety hung over me. “Is this forever?”