Monday, October 28, 2013

Sick days, sick thoughts

Two weeks ago I had the kind of cold that requires you do nothing but lay perfectly still and sip tea because you have absolutely NO ability to do anything else. Not sure where it came from but one morning I walked to the door with my lunch bag and backpack ready to take on the world. However I stopped for a moment because I suddenly didn't have enough energy to open the door. I put everything down and retreated to the bedroom where I stayed almost exclusively for the next 48 hours.

I felt doughy, weak and like my muscle tissue was evaporating. I felt fluids soak my tissue turning me into a human sized version of the Stay Puff Marshmallow man. I lay there poking at myself unhappily, unable to do much of anything except contemplate my sorry physical state.

I wandered into the kitchen for a tea refill and looked at the dishes in the sink--I then wondered briefly if I can do a load of laundry and tidy all that up. Or do some writing. Or log a few hours of email time for work and avoid being so behind on it all.

And then I had a different thought. The thought was "this is you being sick".

That was all. I was sick. There was nothing to do except rest. The soreness, the state of my energy, my pallid complexion, my total domestic disarray were all perfectly consistent with a person being under the weather. Not pathetic. Not behind. Just sick.

The other peevish little bitch of a voice (the one wondering if this downtime could be used more productively and making note of how I am losing ground and muscle tone just laying here) is not at all ok with breaking with the superstitions I have around being a "better version of me".  This stopping to rest represents an enormous slide backwards towards...what?

All this activity I think I'm missing out on represents some huge distance I want to put between an ideal version of myself and what I think is undesirable/unlovable/unacceptable about me (even though these ideas inhabit exactly the same mind).

The best version of me, the one I am anyway (regardless of what I do), decided to just be sick for a few days and rest.

Amazingly my life didn't crash and burn. Now I am back at work rested and refreshed, whistling a happy tune--the imagined, pallid dough girl didn't show up in the mirror today either. There are a few dishes to be done but I'll get to them. 

And that's how it is when I whisper to myself "how could this time be used more kindly?"

What are you whispering to yourself these days?

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