As yesterday passed I found myself brightening up just a little, I had a feeling at least that I had just that bit more energy, at first I found myself thinking sods law at it’s best again, here I am a decision made and things start to improve. It didn’t take me long to realise that it was nothing of the sort, I guess that mentally I had improved just knowing that I was removing some of the weight of my coming days and that I had finally been honest with myself. It is strange just the difference that something that simple, can really change how you feel, but I have found it happening again and again. I always thought that it was a rather odd thing to be able to do, to lie to yourself, surely you would know, surely it was impossible as I thought that a lie was a conscious act, but trust me it’s not. It is almost as though we are preprogrammed to do it, as a way of continuing even when we know we actually can’t, but just by telling ourselves we can, we do. I have lost count of the number of times that I have pushed and pushed even once I was convinced that I couldn’t, just because there was that little nagging, lying voice telling me “yes you can”. I see the purpose in that when you are trying to complete something, or achieve a great goal, but when that voice applies itself to your health, well all it achieves is to make you worse, not better. It seems like most liars it doesn’t know when to stop, or even sees when the story has grown out of control and all that lies ahead is collapse.

I have been tracking my daily condition over the last few weeks, only looking at how I feel in the morning and last thing at night, there is one factor that I have had to remove and that is the heat element. Summertime is notorious for destroying people with MS and I am no exception, which means the only way I could be sure of what was me and what was summer was to try and remove it totally from the equation. To be honest there have only been a couple of days where the daytime temperature has really affected me, I have worked doubly hard this year on keeping the house cool and it has been so effective that I don’t remember a single day where I have been sat here sweating and feeling like death, not even at the warmest times. It has just gone past 10am and I am already struggling with a desire to just slump and give in, but no I am not going to give into it, nor am I going to stop pushing myself totally, I personally believe that would be like writing my own death warrant. I honestly think that for everyone giving up on goals and their achievement is the worst thing any of us can do, but you have to be sensible about it and reassess over and over as your health changes just what you can still do and what your goals are and that they are actually achievable. So yesterday after I wrote my post I continued with the day exactly as I had it planned, but I added for one day only a new goal, to work out what had to be changed for me to feel good about myself as a person and to feel the best I could with my health the way it is. So going forward these are the changes that I think will actually make a difference and that will be visible to those who follow me.

I have stripped out one more level of the work I put into Twitter, reducing the number of daily Tweets and the number of names I need to collect so that I can send them out. I will still go through every tweet I send to read the responses and because I am a numbers freak, I will still count the numbers of retweets and favourites each Quote and PSMyWords receives, but I am closing my Quotes site and my PSMyWords site, removing all the work that goes around them. On the surface, it doesn’t sound like much, but I estimate that it will free up just over an hour each day, an hour that I now need for rest, either just relaxing or even sleeping if that is what’s needed. Just knowing I have that breathing space on my bad days, will make a difference and remove some of the pressure I put on myself.

Reading that back makes me feel pathetic, when I consider my past life and the activities I crammed, not just into a day but every hour of it, the fact I am on paper removing almost nothing and that nothing took me an hour, well I am sure you understand. How you see yourself is so important and for me has been a struggle from the day I became housebound. It takes a lot of work just to make yourself adapt and a lot more to convince yourself that you aren’t a total waste of oxygen, something that I know will get harder and harder as time goes on. For now, I may have taken the major steps of admitting, assessing and changing my daily goals, it will take just a bit longer to start to feel like I am still achieving, rather than failing ever further.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 12/07/12 – Frustration & Stress

My hair dyeing season yesterday was interesting, to say the least, I know that my arms would hurt like hell and my dexterity would cause some problems but it took me longer to clear up than it did to apply the dye, wash it out and dry it. But it had more of an effect than just making my hair all purple rather than a washed out pinky colour with grey roots. Having naturally strawberry…..