I have found myself in the past few days wondering about something that I have never considered before. Those that know me well may have even seen it in my writing, as I know when I read it back, I feel it. I’m tired, tired in a way that I honestly don’t think that I have ever felt before. It isn’t fatigue or exhaustion, it’s a tiredness that consumes you, both physically and mentally, way beyond fatigue. Fatigue has never left me just sitting doing nothing, not thinking, not feeling just stopped and worse still, with no desire to even find a way to start again. It isn’t as though I haven’t tried to fight it, or even to subdue it, but when you really don’t have the true desire to fight, it is bound to fail. I once described fatigue as….

a tiredness that grips every cell of you and then takes your soul as well, the amount you sleep or the quality of it, quite simply doesn’t make the slightest difference and it drags you down and down until it is ready to let go. There is this maddening circle that you get caught up in, all you want, is sleep, to crawl into your bed pull the covers up as far as they will go and to block not just the world but your mind and body as well, but sleep changes nothing!

When I wrote that 18 months ago, I thought that I was describing the worst tiredness there was, but even then I still had one thing that was mine, my free will. I could always muster up the will to do things, if not the energy to carry them out, but now, that will is tired as well.

I don’t know what it is that has changed, or what the cause is, but I quite honestly don’t have anything to give right now. Before anyone pipes up with the usual suggestion of depression, well pipe down, it’s not. I’m not depressed, I just have this need to stop, to go with my body and to rest in ways that right now, I don’t. When I wrote yesterday about how everything is now stalled by this list of “What if’s”, what I didn’t really say, is that it really is everything, not just those extra things. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is I want or need to do, even something that is essential, like going to the toilet, that little voice saying “Really, you want to do this?”. It always chirps up, always has to be heard. In the past month, it has grown louder and more persistent and now, I feel I need to listen to it.

So I apologise to those who come to my site daily, knowing that they will find a fresh blog every day, but that may not be the case from now on. The time has come not to hang up my pen, but to let it at least have time to refill before I ask it to write again. I have been considering this for a while, while I pushed myself on, keeping to a rule I wrote for myself, that I had to write daily. Quite simply, it has all become too much and I need to be able to take time out, time to do nothing. It has been such a huge issue in my mind, so many things to consider as it means that I am going to have to change my routine, and that scares the hell out of me.

Routine has held me together now for 9 years. It has supplied me with a structure, a frame to my day that allows me to track where I am, where I should be and what I’m going to do next. Oddly the simplest thing to leave out of my routine is my blog. To those who read it, I know that isn’t the case, but the two-hour spell that it fills, is right in the middle of my day, as I always write one day ahead. So what you are reading now, was written yesterday. This early afternoon slot would be perfect for a lot of things, especially sleep. Having said all that, it still scares me, making such a change. At this very second, I am telling all of you this, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t write daily if I feel the need. What it does mean, is there may be the odd gap as well, if that is what my body says I must do on any individual day.

I guess that I have always known that this day would come around, that I would have to give in to the tiredness, that has been growing steadily over the years. I’ve lived with it for so long, that I don’t know what it would be like to be free of it, and no matter what I do, all it does is grow. All those others, tiredness, fatigue, and exhaustion, they all sit above it, this tiredness is the one that sits in your core, never relieved, never lifting and only growing, I so wish that I had another name to call it, but no matter how I have tried, what I have read or anything else, I can’t find one. It is as though, my health has slowly been eating away at my life energy, that why I say it is at my core. With every dip in my health, it has taken another chunk and now, what is left, just isn’t enough to take every day at the same pace. I am life tired, but that doesn’t mean I am tired of life. They are two very different things, that I am sure of.

If you follow me, well you’ll know when I have written something new, as you’ll receive a notification and if you miss me, for now at least, you will still find me daily on twitter. But there is one thing I will promise, for now, I will never be gone for more than two days, more likely or not, it will only be one at a time.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 18/05/2014 – There is always more

I am setting out again on the trail of changing my smoking habits, I have smoked since I was 12 and then I was on 20 a day, rising to my worst of 80 a day. Smoking has been the one thing that was hit hard when I was made redundant, simply I just couldn’t afford it, so I bought out of part of my redundancy one of the early e-cigarettes, and hundreds of nicotine cartridges, well I only have 300 left, so I had to start making a new plan. It has taken my most of my spare time last week to find exactly what I wanted, my new higher voltage, higher volume, higher vapour e-cig is now on its way. Although I found the old one OK, I just never got……