Today Was Hard
Today was hard.
It started with waking up. For several weeks now, my fibromyalgia has been acting up, keeping my pain levels higher than I'm used to--my guess is the ever-changing and abnormal weather is the culprit--and leaving me constantly fatigued. No matter how much I sleep, it's never enough; I'm always exhausted, and waking up is, quite frankly, a bitch.
Getting out of bed is worse. The wrong places crack, and the right places don't. My muscles, tight from sleep, scream as I force them to move. And the little voice inside my head is an ever-present devil on my shoulder, taunting me with all the things I need to get done today, and I already know I won't. Which he follows up with, "Then why bother at all?" The urge to curl back up under the covers is nearly undeniable; it's so much easier to lay there and not move, to sleep and not think.
The morning goes by fairly smoothly. I didn't get up until after ten, after all, and by then my husband (on one of his days off) had already taken care of the kids, God bless him. I'm able to take my time waking up, making the round to the bathroom, throwing on some comfy lounge pants and an over-sized T-shirt. I briefly consider getting on the computer, but I take note of my pain levels (see above) and decide I'm not up to trying to work at the moment. Maybe later. (For the record, afternoons and evenings tend to be my more productive times.) So I fire up Skyrim on the Xbox One and spend a couple of mindless hours living the life of a badass dark elf.
Around lunchtime, my husband hollers at me that lunch is ready, and do I want to come upstairs and eat and maybe play a board game? My initial reaction is "No, I don't." I'm not overly hungry--that's another lovely symptom of the fibromyalgia and resulting depression: no appetite--and I'm definitely not in the mood to be social. I was perfectly happy wasting my day away in Tamriel.
Just to interject here real quick--there's a reason I and so many others with similar conditions can spend hours at a time reading, or playing video games, or binge-watching Netflix: it's numbing. It's mindless. It takes no real effort. For a short period of time, we can forget how much we hurt, whether it's physically or emotionally/psychologically. We can forget that we feel like failures. We can forget that chances are, we're letting somebody down. We can forget that there are a million other things we should be doing as responsible adults, but for whatever reason, simply can't. And I do mean can't. It's not that we don't want to. It's not that we're being lazy. It's that we literally are unable to get up and do what we need to, even if our mind is screaming at us to do it. It's not for lack of trying. It's not for lack of motivation. We. Can't.
So anyway, back to lunchtime. As I said, I really didn't want to go upstairs and be social. But my husband had taken the time to cook for me, and he likes to spend time together, and--unlike me--he's a social butterfly, so interaction with other people is very important to him. So I told myself to put on my big girl pants and go upstairs.
We settle on DC Deck Building, which is our usual go-to game, and which I usually enjoy. And we asked my future sister-in-law to join us. So far, it doesn't sound like a recipe for disaster, right?
Well, the game didn't go so well for me. Despite building a good deck, I couldn't get my cards to work together the way I wanted them to, and my husband was kicking the shit out of my sister-in-law and me. Now, while it's fair to say that I'm extremely competitive, and I don't like to lose, I don't mind losing this game as long as I feel like I'm in the running. This wasn't the case today; it was obvious I was losing--big time--and it was very frustrating because it wasn't because of anything I was doing. The cards just weren't lining up.
So, add the frustration of the game to the discomfort of the chair I'm sitting in, which only adds to my already higher-than-normal pain levels, plus figure in some sideline family drama that I won't try to explain here--that's several sessions with the shrink, right there--and I'm a mess. And it's very obvious that I'm a mess. Enough so that my husband and sister-in-law were both like, "Hey, why don't we just call it?"
So I headed downstairs to take a shower, because I've promised my daughter I will take her to the store after she gets home from school. Taking a shower is fifteen minutes of head games. My inner dialogue went something like this:
I shouldn't have gone up there. I should have known better. Now {sister-in-law} is going to think I'm a sore loser, and yes, I don't like to lose, but I'm not that much of a bitch when I lose, and that's what she's going to think. Add that to my brother's obviously already told her I'm cutthroat when it comes to games, because she said as much the other day, and she doesn't know I have depression yet, so she's not going to know that I was mad because I was hurting and my head's fucked up, she's just going to think I'm a bitch, and she wouldn't believe me if she knew anyway, she'd just think it was an excuse, and dammit, I really hate my family right now. It's totally not fair the way they love my brother and gush over {sister-in-law} when I know damn well they don't like {husband} and never have, and they don't care about us the way they do my brother and {sister-in-law}, and dad never calls to see what {husband} and I want for dinner, or if we'd like to eat with him and mom, we're always left to take care of ourselves, but no, he's got to cook for {brother} and {sister-in-law} and fuck, I am so ready to move, we have got to get stuff done, we've only got a couple of weeks left, but it hurts when I work, and how am I ever going to get it all done and get it all packed and moved when I can barely just tidy up our room without being ready to drop and on the verge of tears--and then my mother's voice interjects--Well, if you'd lose some weight, things wouldn't be hard, it just takes dedication, you can do it if you try hard enough, you just have to be willing to put the work in, I mean, look at me, I did it, and you can too, I know you can--and now it's back to me--I have been trying and I have been exercising and I've been more careful about what I'm eating, and I've made absolutely no progress, and it hurts so damn much to exercise, and if it's not going to make any difference than why bother? I mean, this cycle is so damn frustrating: I can't do what I want to do because I'm overweight. I'm overweight because it hurts like hell to do anything, and if I do too much in one day, I'm unable to do anything for the next three, and even when I am doing something, I'm not making any noticeable progress, and because I'm not making any progress, I can't do the things I want. Mom and Dad don't get it, they just think I'm fat and too lazy to do anything about it, and why do I give such a fuck if I have their approval or not anyway, I'm 30 years old for Pete's sake, and this is their issue for not even trying to understand, not mine. Why can't they understand? Why don't they want to understand? Why do I care so much? It's never going to change, so just get over it already.
And by this point I'm in tears and getting out of the shower feels like too much effort, so I just sit down under the spray and cry. Finally I manage to get out, dry off, get dressed.
I make it back into my room, where my husband asks me what's wrong, and I try to put into words all the thoughts that were just swirling around in my head, and it all sound ridiculous when I say it out loud. The little voice on my shoulder is telling me I sound like a petulant child and should just grow a pair. My husband knows I'm hurting, but he doesn't know what to say other than sorry, and he has no idea what to do to help. I don't have the answer to that myself, so we're at an impasse.
Remember how I was supposed to take my daughter to the store? Yeah, that's not happening. I'm in no mental frame of mind to drive, and now my pain levels have spiked higher due to stress and the crying jag. So now I have to explain to my six-year-old that Daddy's going to take her instead, to which she replies, "But Mommy, you promised!" Which I did. So I can now chalk being a bad mother and failing my kids up on my list of accomplishments today.
Somehow we manage to convince her that Daddy will do just as good a job; she and her sisters head off with him and I'm back to being by myself. I immediately head back to Skyrim; it's the only place I've been anywhere close to okay all day.
A little after seven in the evening, I tell myself that I've messed around and felt sorry for myself enough today, and it's time to get off my ass and do something productive, no matter how much I would rather not. So I head into the girls' bedroom--which is a disaster--and announce that we're going to clean it up. Cue the "But Mom, I don't want to's" and the "But Mom, I'm tired's."
At first I handle it alright. I calmly reply, "I don't care if you don't want to, and you're not too tired to be up playing and watching TV, so we're doing this. Let's go." For the next hour, I berate them as they pretend to be mindless idiots who don't know where their toys go. By nine the room is clean, my voice is hoarse from shouting, and I have two very unhappy little girls who are mad that it's now time for bed and can't seem to grasp the fact that if they hadn't wasted two hours dragging their feet about cleaning their room, they could have been done over an hour ago and still had time to play before bed. Still, they return bedtime hugs and kisses with "I love you's"--no matter how resigned--and snuggle in fairly contentedly.
My back is shrieking, but I know as soon as I stop moving, I won't be able to start again, so I fold the basket of clean laundry that's been sitting there for a day and a half, then force myself to take another shower, as I'm hot and sweaty from the housework. Which brings us to now.
At this point, you may be wondering why I decided to get online and write a blog after the day I've had. Why not just head to be and get an extra hour's sleep?
Well, the first answer is this: I probably won't be able to fall asleep for at least another hour. That's how fucked up the disease is. I'm physically exhausted, but that little voice inside my head won't shut up. It keeps rehashing the day, telling me how I could have done things differently, how I could have been better, pointing out all the things I failed to get done today and how behind I already am for tomorrow.
The second answer is more important, and much more involved, and it is this: mental illness is a real thing that affects a lot--A LOT--of people. And it doesn't get talked about. Depression--in fact, most mental illnesses--are thought of as "soft" diseases; they can't really be all that bad, because you're not going through chemo, or staying in the hospital, or wearing some sort of contraption to fix it. Worse, they're thought of as excuses. People who have never suffered a mental illness have no way of understanding it, and because there are so few "visible" effects, it's easy for them to think it's not real. That it's just a way of excusing laziness, or lack of motivation, or why we don't want something badly enough.
I am bound and determined to see that change. I will not be silent about my issues; I'm not going to try and hide them because it might make other people uncomfortable, or they might be forced to face the fact that maybe they're wrong. There are too many other people out there like me who don't think anybody gets it, who think they're alone and have no one to turn to. People who suffer from mental illness--people like me--need advocates. They need people who care. They need people who are willing to stand up and say, "I see you, I hear you, I understand you, and I will do what I can to help you."
That's why I took the time after this hellish day to tell you about it. Because I can guarantee you, there are countless others out there--most likely someone you know, and maybe care about--who had the same day. Who are thinking the same thoughts. Who are feeling the same emotions. And most of them are too scared to speak up, too afraid to talk about it, because they know they risk facing judgment and ridicule.
I'm blessed. I have a husband who supports me and a mother-in-law who has the exact same condition I do, so she's been there, done that. I have co-workers who have my back and are more of a family to me than blood. I have a support system. For every person who make judgments about me based on limited information, I have someone saying "We know it's not that way; We know who you are."
Too many others don't. So I will speak out for them. I will be their voice. I will be an open ear willing to listen to them. And I will stand up to anyone who would put them down or hold them back. This is a start.
Today was hard. But I made it.
So can you.
Much love.
It started with waking up. For several weeks now, my fibromyalgia has been acting up, keeping my pain levels higher than I'm used to--my guess is the ever-changing and abnormal weather is the culprit--and leaving me constantly fatigued. No matter how much I sleep, it's never enough; I'm always exhausted, and waking up is, quite frankly, a bitch.
Getting out of bed is worse. The wrong places crack, and the right places don't. My muscles, tight from sleep, scream as I force them to move. And the little voice inside my head is an ever-present devil on my shoulder, taunting me with all the things I need to get done today, and I already know I won't. Which he follows up with, "Then why bother at all?" The urge to curl back up under the covers is nearly undeniable; it's so much easier to lay there and not move, to sleep and not think.
The morning goes by fairly smoothly. I didn't get up until after ten, after all, and by then my husband (on one of his days off) had already taken care of the kids, God bless him. I'm able to take my time waking up, making the round to the bathroom, throwing on some comfy lounge pants and an over-sized T-shirt. I briefly consider getting on the computer, but I take note of my pain levels (see above) and decide I'm not up to trying to work at the moment. Maybe later. (For the record, afternoons and evenings tend to be my more productive times.) So I fire up Skyrim on the Xbox One and spend a couple of mindless hours living the life of a badass dark elf.
Around lunchtime, my husband hollers at me that lunch is ready, and do I want to come upstairs and eat and maybe play a board game? My initial reaction is "No, I don't." I'm not overly hungry--that's another lovely symptom of the fibromyalgia and resulting depression: no appetite--and I'm definitely not in the mood to be social. I was perfectly happy wasting my day away in Tamriel.
Just to interject here real quick--there's a reason I and so many others with similar conditions can spend hours at a time reading, or playing video games, or binge-watching Netflix: it's numbing. It's mindless. It takes no real effort. For a short period of time, we can forget how much we hurt, whether it's physically or emotionally/psychologically. We can forget that we feel like failures. We can forget that chances are, we're letting somebody down. We can forget that there are a million other things we should be doing as responsible adults, but for whatever reason, simply can't. And I do mean can't. It's not that we don't want to. It's not that we're being lazy. It's that we literally are unable to get up and do what we need to, even if our mind is screaming at us to do it. It's not for lack of trying. It's not for lack of motivation. We. Can't.
So anyway, back to lunchtime. As I said, I really didn't want to go upstairs and be social. But my husband had taken the time to cook for me, and he likes to spend time together, and--unlike me--he's a social butterfly, so interaction with other people is very important to him. So I told myself to put on my big girl pants and go upstairs.
We settle on DC Deck Building, which is our usual go-to game, and which I usually enjoy. And we asked my future sister-in-law to join us. So far, it doesn't sound like a recipe for disaster, right?
Well, the game didn't go so well for me. Despite building a good deck, I couldn't get my cards to work together the way I wanted them to, and my husband was kicking the shit out of my sister-in-law and me. Now, while it's fair to say that I'm extremely competitive, and I don't like to lose, I don't mind losing this game as long as I feel like I'm in the running. This wasn't the case today; it was obvious I was losing--big time--and it was very frustrating because it wasn't because of anything I was doing. The cards just weren't lining up.
So, add the frustration of the game to the discomfort of the chair I'm sitting in, which only adds to my already higher-than-normal pain levels, plus figure in some sideline family drama that I won't try to explain here--that's several sessions with the shrink, right there--and I'm a mess. And it's very obvious that I'm a mess. Enough so that my husband and sister-in-law were both like, "Hey, why don't we just call it?"
So I headed downstairs to take a shower, because I've promised my daughter I will take her to the store after she gets home from school. Taking a shower is fifteen minutes of head games. My inner dialogue went something like this:
I shouldn't have gone up there. I should have known better. Now {sister-in-law} is going to think I'm a sore loser, and yes, I don't like to lose, but I'm not that much of a bitch when I lose, and that's what she's going to think. Add that to my brother's obviously already told her I'm cutthroat when it comes to games, because she said as much the other day, and she doesn't know I have depression yet, so she's not going to know that I was mad because I was hurting and my head's fucked up, she's just going to think I'm a bitch, and she wouldn't believe me if she knew anyway, she'd just think it was an excuse, and dammit, I really hate my family right now. It's totally not fair the way they love my brother and gush over {sister-in-law} when I know damn well they don't like {husband} and never have, and they don't care about us the way they do my brother and {sister-in-law}, and dad never calls to see what {husband} and I want for dinner, or if we'd like to eat with him and mom, we're always left to take care of ourselves, but no, he's got to cook for {brother} and {sister-in-law} and fuck, I am so ready to move, we have got to get stuff done, we've only got a couple of weeks left, but it hurts when I work, and how am I ever going to get it all done and get it all packed and moved when I can barely just tidy up our room without being ready to drop and on the verge of tears--and then my mother's voice interjects--Well, if you'd lose some weight, things wouldn't be hard, it just takes dedication, you can do it if you try hard enough, you just have to be willing to put the work in, I mean, look at me, I did it, and you can too, I know you can--and now it's back to me--I have been trying and I have been exercising and I've been more careful about what I'm eating, and I've made absolutely no progress, and it hurts so damn much to exercise, and if it's not going to make any difference than why bother? I mean, this cycle is so damn frustrating: I can't do what I want to do because I'm overweight. I'm overweight because it hurts like hell to do anything, and if I do too much in one day, I'm unable to do anything for the next three, and even when I am doing something, I'm not making any noticeable progress, and because I'm not making any progress, I can't do the things I want. Mom and Dad don't get it, they just think I'm fat and too lazy to do anything about it, and why do I give such a fuck if I have their approval or not anyway, I'm 30 years old for Pete's sake, and this is their issue for not even trying to understand, not mine. Why can't they understand? Why don't they want to understand? Why do I care so much? It's never going to change, so just get over it already.
And by this point I'm in tears and getting out of the shower feels like too much effort, so I just sit down under the spray and cry. Finally I manage to get out, dry off, get dressed.
I make it back into my room, where my husband asks me what's wrong, and I try to put into words all the thoughts that were just swirling around in my head, and it all sound ridiculous when I say it out loud. The little voice on my shoulder is telling me I sound like a petulant child and should just grow a pair. My husband knows I'm hurting, but he doesn't know what to say other than sorry, and he has no idea what to do to help. I don't have the answer to that myself, so we're at an impasse.
Remember how I was supposed to take my daughter to the store? Yeah, that's not happening. I'm in no mental frame of mind to drive, and now my pain levels have spiked higher due to stress and the crying jag. So now I have to explain to my six-year-old that Daddy's going to take her instead, to which she replies, "But Mommy, you promised!" Which I did. So I can now chalk being a bad mother and failing my kids up on my list of accomplishments today.
Somehow we manage to convince her that Daddy will do just as good a job; she and her sisters head off with him and I'm back to being by myself. I immediately head back to Skyrim; it's the only place I've been anywhere close to okay all day.
A little after seven in the evening, I tell myself that I've messed around and felt sorry for myself enough today, and it's time to get off my ass and do something productive, no matter how much I would rather not. So I head into the girls' bedroom--which is a disaster--and announce that we're going to clean it up. Cue the "But Mom, I don't want to's" and the "But Mom, I'm tired's."
At first I handle it alright. I calmly reply, "I don't care if you don't want to, and you're not too tired to be up playing and watching TV, so we're doing this. Let's go." For the next hour, I berate them as they pretend to be mindless idiots who don't know where their toys go. By nine the room is clean, my voice is hoarse from shouting, and I have two very unhappy little girls who are mad that it's now time for bed and can't seem to grasp the fact that if they hadn't wasted two hours dragging their feet about cleaning their room, they could have been done over an hour ago and still had time to play before bed. Still, they return bedtime hugs and kisses with "I love you's"--no matter how resigned--and snuggle in fairly contentedly.
My back is shrieking, but I know as soon as I stop moving, I won't be able to start again, so I fold the basket of clean laundry that's been sitting there for a day and a half, then force myself to take another shower, as I'm hot and sweaty from the housework. Which brings us to now.
At this point, you may be wondering why I decided to get online and write a blog after the day I've had. Why not just head to be and get an extra hour's sleep?
Well, the first answer is this: I probably won't be able to fall asleep for at least another hour. That's how fucked up the disease is. I'm physically exhausted, but that little voice inside my head won't shut up. It keeps rehashing the day, telling me how I could have done things differently, how I could have been better, pointing out all the things I failed to get done today and how behind I already am for tomorrow.
The second answer is more important, and much more involved, and it is this: mental illness is a real thing that affects a lot--A LOT--of people. And it doesn't get talked about. Depression--in fact, most mental illnesses--are thought of as "soft" diseases; they can't really be all that bad, because you're not going through chemo, or staying in the hospital, or wearing some sort of contraption to fix it. Worse, they're thought of as excuses. People who have never suffered a mental illness have no way of understanding it, and because there are so few "visible" effects, it's easy for them to think it's not real. That it's just a way of excusing laziness, or lack of motivation, or why we don't want something badly enough.
I am bound and determined to see that change. I will not be silent about my issues; I'm not going to try and hide them because it might make other people uncomfortable, or they might be forced to face the fact that maybe they're wrong. There are too many other people out there like me who don't think anybody gets it, who think they're alone and have no one to turn to. People who suffer from mental illness--people like me--need advocates. They need people who care. They need people who are willing to stand up and say, "I see you, I hear you, I understand you, and I will do what I can to help you."
That's why I took the time after this hellish day to tell you about it. Because I can guarantee you, there are countless others out there--most likely someone you know, and maybe care about--who had the same day. Who are thinking the same thoughts. Who are feeling the same emotions. And most of them are too scared to speak up, too afraid to talk about it, because they know they risk facing judgment and ridicule.
I'm blessed. I have a husband who supports me and a mother-in-law who has the exact same condition I do, so she's been there, done that. I have co-workers who have my back and are more of a family to me than blood. I have a support system. For every person who make judgments about me based on limited information, I have someone saying "We know it's not that way; We know who you are."
Too many others don't. So I will speak out for them. I will be their voice. I will be an open ear willing to listen to them. And I will stand up to anyone who would put them down or hold them back. This is a start.
Today was hard. But I made it.
So can you.
Much love.
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