You know how if you are in a net, things can just get worse if you struggle?
I think many of us dealing with hard situations tend to calm down and not test the limits much. We don't want to feel the nets or spiderwebs. If you don't try doing things you couldn't do anyway, you aren't reminded that you can't do them.
The up-side to doing this is that you can believe that your life is fairly normal.
But the down-side to this is that you can believe your life is fairly normal.
That's what I've been doing. I've been acting like it's normal to get exhausted working 25 hours a week, to eat only disgusting healthy food and no packaged food, not to be able to eat out, to have trouble doing social things like going to parties, and to have to spend a lot of time preparing specific foods, taking herbs, etc.
I've been assuming it's normal to get injured frequently, to be highly medication-sensitive, to take a long time to recover from injuries, if I recover at all.
You can get used to it, and getting accustomed to it is in a way adaptive.
However, it's also really depressing to think this is just the way life is. Life didn't used to be so hard. The things that happen to me on a weekly basis now used to happen maybe once a year before I got Lyme. The amount of coping requirements is up. Way up. Hell, it is so high.
There's something different about prolonged coping with small things. It's different than having one major blow and then recovering. Instead it's the tiny accumulation of little assaults, none of which is large enough to get much sympathy or even to help it register with you that "something hard has happened."
They come so frequently that you come to expect them. You don't have time off between them, since they overlap. It's this constant low-level coping with no rest for years.
But back to the maladptive side of adapting:
If you start to assume life just IS this way for you:
-You can lose hope.
-You can feel like you just deserve less than others, or are slated for more suffering.
-You get an ambivalent feeling about life.
Sometimes it IS good to remember life isn't this way for everyone.
Just now, I was thinking, Wow, I used to be able to work 40 hours more easily than I now work 25, and that was even when I had some degree of CFS before getting Lyme.
It's crazy to realize that some people would be able to do things that are totally impossible for me.
What would I do if I could do anything?
Ha.
I'd probably eat those artificially-sweetened yogurts. haha. they aren't good for you but they are delicious. the splenda-sweetened lemon and key lime pie yogurts?
I'd have a driver's license and rent a zip car to go shopping rather than having to wait for buses.
I'd eat far more packaged food, frozen dinners, etc. Cooking for yourself sucks.
I'd go listen to loud music a lot.
Be more social.
Drink alcohol (I seriously can't drink now, it makes me relapse. Weird because while I had Lyme I *could* drink alcohol without problems. It's only now that I'm doing better that I can't.)
It's actually relieving to realize that in some way, those are what I could hope to expect in my society. Lots more relief and things to make life easier and more fun.
That's what I'm missing: fun to balance out the work. My whole life is work, because I have to spend nights and weekends doing treatment and research and working on emotional problems and stuff, and I haven't connected with ways to really enjoy myself here yet. Well, hanging out with my partner is great, but we've both had scabies so we haven't seen much of each other in the past month. Blah.
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