hitting the wall of immesurable steps

I feel like I've hit a wall. I've made a lot of progress up until this point - the scooter is gone, the crutches are gone, the boot is gone...I take showers, I do cook and do dishes...I've become basically functional. Basically. And now it's time for the next steps.

The problem is, the next steps are nowhere near as measurable as the first ones. In order to walk fluidly and exercise and do normal people stuff, I have to gain strength, gain flexibility, agility...get all the stuff back that I've lost since the surgery. The progress on this stuff is not easily monitored. So I do my exercises every day, sometimes they make me feel flexible and sometimes they make me feel sore and swollen. That fucking screw is still sticking out of my ankle - perhaps even more so now - and I wonder if all of this hardware is going to have to come out...if I'm going to need ANOTHER surgery...that unknown puts me in a major funk.

I start a job in 2 weeks, am I gonna be able to drive? Am I gonna be able to walk from the parking lot to the building comfortably? How will I know when I can? What level of flexibility and strength and agility is NORMAL? WHAT THE FUCK IS NORMAL???? Am I making progress? WHAT THE FUCK DOES PROGRESS LOOK LIKE? And so on and so forth...

I'm sick of thinking about it, I'm sick of caring - I don't want to think about how bendy my ankle is today, if it's gonna hurt when I step out of bed or do I need to massage it first? I don't want to wonder if my compression sock is actually working or if it's bad that I didn't ice today. I want to think about fun normal people things - like white supremacy in the legal system and overdose and political/religious/economic turmoil and everything that's been in the news recently. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?? Does my ankle REALLY need to over-shadow that???!!!

In other news, I bought a car I can't drive yet.

But I CAN stand next to it without crutches, so I guess that's a step...