Sometimes other people just suck the life right out of you. They make demands on you until your spirit is depleted.
This is where I’m at right now. Exhausted and battling to find the reserves to get through just one more day. And then I make it through that one, and I have to get through another. Crawling to the weekend so that I can finally have time and rest, to gather strength to get through another week.
It’s like my days are on a conveyor belt, dropping off the end into the aether, while I run in the opposite direction. Exhausted and getting nowhere.
This is what chronic fatigue is to me. In fact the symptoms of chronic fatigue are so similar to the symptoms I had when I had cancer that I can’t tell the difference, but because I work, because I have to keep trying, others don’t see or understand the pain in my body. I feel like I’m leaking petrol and any moment my engine is going to splutter to nothing. I feel like every footstep takes a mammoth effort, yet all I get for it are requests and demands. To try harder, to work more, to give my all.
Believe it or not; they’re getting my all, and it’s breaking me.
I want nothing more than to take pain killers and hide beneath my duvet sleeping. I’m tired. I’m tired all the time, and it makes me less patient, more snappish, less likely to put up with bullshit and drama because I just don’t have the energy. I don’t have it in me to listen to life-suckers and those who only take.
Chronic fatigue is like a parasite, sucking the energy and spirit right out of me, and when it’s at its worst, it feels like I’ve been beaten. This is the aftermath of chemo years later.
My brain has stuff to do, a to-do list to get down, but my body won’t let me. I have plans to make, a future to build, yet I have to figure out how to do it with a body that won’t co-operate.
Chronic fatigue doesn’t mean a person feels a little bit tired, it doesn’t mean they’ve had a busy week, it means their body is broken, and just because they struggle along, they don’t give in, they fight against it, it doesn’t mean they’re not ill. And when they give into it, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy or weak.
Sometimes I have to crumble in order to build myself back up. That’s what chronic fatigue is to me.
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