If I needed proof that things are bad just now, I had it yesterday as I totally stuck to doing nothing, not me at all. I actually closed down everything to do with Twitter, blogs, searches and anything I would normally include in my day and I didn’t return to them at all! I spent the majority of my day resting and what was left, playing a game on my PC, something I haven’t spent more than half an hour at the end of my day doing for far too long. I used to really enjoy PC games, I like the ones where you have to think about what to do to get the perfect score, I can’t stand what I know are the most popular games, the shooters and the hidden objects. I don’t think I played more than an hour at a time, even that got too much for me and I had to go and have a sleep before returning, but it was a slow gentle day, something I know fully admit is what is needed at the moment, my plan just now is to keep my days at that level until Monday, I don’t want to rush into doing things that are going to undo things faster than I can repair them.

It is actually really hard for me to admit even to myself that I wasn’t coping and that every day of the past 2 weeks has been a real struggle and all I was doing was pushing and pushing to keep going. I suppose it is just part of me, I never like to be beaten, but almost every day I was hitting empty at some point between 11am and 2pm, my nights sleep wasn’t enough to repair it, just to patch it up for another few hours after which I was eating away at myself, destroying myself minute by minute. I guess most of us find it hard to press the stop button and actually do that, normally for me pressing the stop button meant stopping doing what I was, just to replace it with some other activity just as draining. That was the way I have spent most of my life, but when I crashed the other day, I couldn’t believe just how low I was and how easily when I crashed it was for me to stop, as I wasn’t given a choice, my body had nothing left to use. It is a real sign of just how far down the road of being ill I have travelled, to find that adding in a few small things, a family visit, an interview and a written piece for another web site and the new fridge, which wouldn’t phase me even a year ago, can now destroy me so easily. My big mistake was I didn’t allow enough recovery time from each one. I have become so good at working out my energy levels and what I can and can’t do in a day, that when all this came up in the future, I planned it in as I always do, but I got it wrong. I hadn’t allowed for just how much my health had deteriorated, when I worked out the recovery time required, I didn’t build that fact in. Add in the interview taking longer, the muddle in the kitchen caused by the fridge being too much of a draw, that I had to keep checking what Adam was up to through there, my determination to get it all finished and you have a rather large deficit, one I totally ignored.

Every step of the way with this illness it has had this art of you push it, it will strike back twice as hard, so this is totally all my own fault. The real problem thought is even simpler, I am human, I am a pigheaded human to be accurate, one who just finds it hard to accept that I can’t manage to less than most people would in the evening after a full days work. As I said my plan is to stay on a do as little as possible line for another three days, then assess how I am before I head back into doing what I normally do, but I am also going to try and reassess my entire daily and weekly plan to see if there is anything I can do that will help to prevent this happening again in the near future. I know that I have spoken before about grouping activities so that you aren’t on your feet too much, but I don’t think I have directly written about just how much doing something like I do on line daily, is as capable of draining you as fast as physical activity does. Let’s face it most of my day is spent typing and thinking, I expect most of us don’t see that as activity, but it is and it is just as likely to leave you drained, as walking back and forward to the kitchen 5 times. That’s why I have had to cut dramatically in the last year the amount of tweets I send out and all the other peripheral work that I do, like the now four sites I have opened run and closed again, simply because it all became too much for me. Getting your head around that one is even harder than keeping your physical movement limited. When I choose to put the word “limited” into the name of my blog and my twitter name, I knew I was in for some stick, people telling me you aren’t limited, you are as free as you wish to be in your mind and on line, but I already knew that wasn’t true. I am limited, I am limited to the amount of anything I do each day, other than sleeping, that seems all to easy regardless of anything else. I slept 2 extra hours again yesterday and all night with ease, in between sleeps I sit feeling as thought I could sleep any second, two days in a row were I have slept for 15 hours, if that isn’t limiting, then please tell me what it is. Ask yourself this, how would you cope if all you had were 9 hours a day awake and all of them feeling drained and washed out?

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 21/08/12 – The nature to cope > http://bit.ly/MMhc7I