Hanging with my buns in the shed, waiting for the rain to stop. (It didn’t stop.)
Status:
This has been the sixth day in a row of me feeling unable to do much, if anything. According to the pattern of “my condition” I should have been capable of stuff yesterday or today, but I’m not. It’s a good reminder that there isn’t really a pattern to chronic fatigue. Sometimes recovery will be quick, sometimes it won’t. This one seems to be on the slow side. Today’s big achievements were loading the dishwasher and putting away my laundry. Oh, and not needing an afternoon nap.
It’s very easy for this to feel like a failure. I’ve definitely gotten better at managing my capacity and my expectations over the last six months, and thanks to some good therapy I’m less likely to get angry and upset when things don’t go as I’d hoped. But the fact remains this autumn was going to see me engaging with the world again and it doesn’t look like much on paper.
I’ve managed about an hour a week on average at work and probably go out of the house/garden twice a week. I’m writing this blog, which is a major achievement in rethinking my writing practice, pacing it over the day instead of cramming in one session, but I haven’t written anything more substantial than a few paragraphs.
It’s a proper glass half empty / half full paradox, I guess. I have made progress, but I also haven’t hit the marks I was kinda hoping I might. Which just means the marks weren’t achievable and need to be adjusted, I guess. Known unknowns.
Really wish the NHS chronic fatigue centre had more capacity and hadn’t been overrun with flu. I could really do with a chat with the occupational therapist there. Fingers crossed for an appointment soon after Christmas.
In the meanwhile farting this out to the handful of you lovely people reading this will have to do.
Overnight listening:
Music:
Reading:
- Pretty birds and silly moos: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act - always worth remembering how hard-won the things we take for granted are, and how easily they could be lost again.
- Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links - if evidence were needed that the Facebook empire is not part of “the internet” in any meaningful way. Anecdote: I’m a member of one, and only one, FB group (for ageing 90s comics nerds) and had to be made an admin because every link I posted (and I only ever post links, because I’m from the actual internet) got flagged as suspicious.
- What the Noam Chomsky – Jeffrey Epstein e-mails tell us - Seeing Chomsky in the troves of Epstein photos and emails has been a bit of a jolt. Surely not Chomksy? This article offers some context for why he was even conversing at all, but it’s really just another reminder that your heroes are just humans who will (at best) make bad decisions and it’s probably best not to have heroes in the first place.
Looking:
- Take that Santa! This is me upside-down and naked in a fireplace – Brooke DiDonato’s best photograph - there are many more great images on her website. I like mirror photos a lot, and this is quite delightful.
- Christopher Anderson’s warts-and-all photos of the Trump administration. - paywalls abound so the best way to see the pics is on Anderson’s Instagram, if you have an account.
- How Edward Weston transformed bums, veg and egg slicers into sculpture - I’m always astonished by Weston’s photographs, doubly so when I remember how old they are. The Pepper from 1930 is just timeless.