Oh it’s A Thing for both Rheumatoid Disease and Fibro but then also during this pandemic. I’m over the panic, and my body is paying for that rush of hormones used to get through that high stress.
Normally I pay for one day of activity through careful planning and then a week of (extra) exhaustion and (extra) pain and often then still a bit of a decline in health which means each event takes me back a little more.
So I had started to accept afternoon rest even when I think it feels like some sort of indulgence. It’s not, it’s therapy. It doesn’t help that so often in history it has been fashionable to look like you are sick- but it’s never really been okay to be sick. Fashion is usually about taking an aesthetic from a group of people without wanting the reality of life as part of that community.
But this pandemic? It’s like an event every few days and my body is not recovering.
So I have been very quiet here, my projects are a mess and everywhere as I’ve started to feel the stress of them being unfinished again.
My research is also in a holding pattern in terms of updating. It’s all there in my notes, and archives, and I have a number of unfinished pages to publish. But I am not able to focus for more than an hour at a time.
Today I managed to get underway with my frog needle case. I wanted to reframe my nifty antique purse but I need to dremel out the pins and I need to prepare for that well in advance. It will need to be the first thing I do in a day. It also is a bit hard as I never did replace my workstation (aka the thing wot holds the dremel in place and takes all the pressure off my busted hands and oh also prevents me hurting myself as the neuropathy is bad and I could you know… wobble the dremel into something.)
But yeah. This pandemic is hard, and the world has actually sped up in terms of expectations of productivity.
If you are finding it difficult, you are not alone, you are also not imagining things, and you are not failing. I can’t even quantify the degree of extra pressure, but I do know it’s gone from feeling like I can finish a project in a few years to not being sure I can get any done ever again.
Even my accessories are taking longer than it should. But they are light, I don’t have to engage my full body, which is part of why working at my computer is so draining difficult, and why machine sewing is so very difficult.
Writing this post has taken effort I really wanted to put into other things but I also know how important is can be to know that other people share an experience. It may not offer the solution needed, but it can help take some of the burden off yourself, set it aside, and focus on what you do know helps you.
This last week, I think, I shared privately an experience that upset me. A friend I admire greatly said she went through the same thing, she had seen it happen to other people, and gave me some peace as I was starting to have self doubt, and thought maybe it was egotistical to feel what I did.
So while I don’t have a solution to prevent that experience happening again, I have some peace that my feelings are not just valid but also not out of place.
Acknowledging an experience is negative is part of the process of getting through it. I can do a whole lot more if I know where my effort has effect. It doesn’t stop me putting in effort, but it channels it into healing and trying to make things better for others.
And it means I can also put a line under it and let the good experiences happen as well. And understand what makes them good. And express what makes them good.