Today I realised that wanting to stay in bed all day and not leave to eat or fetch entertainment is actually a sign that I am ill, and even if I COULD force myself out of bed, I probably wouldn't be able to achieve anything. The issue when your job mostly involves thinking very hard about complicated things is that when your head feels like it is made of cotton wool then there probably isn't much point in even trying to force yourself to engage.
Now, you'd think that I might have realised this way before now, but apparently I really hadn't. I think its the after effect of years of borderline mental health issues, where I assumed that if I could just get over myself and actually leave the bed / room / building or pick up an article and concentrate properly then I'd get over my general malaise and be able to work properly. Well, today I picked myself up out of bed by the early evening, and took myself out to a couple of lectures that I've been looking forward to for a few weeks... And while it wasn't a total waste of time, I was aware that I just wasn't capable of engaging with it as I would like to. It was taking all my energy just to follow the arguments, I didn't have a hope in hell of evaluating them.
When I realised this, it was a light-dawning, choirs singing revelatory moment where suddenly I could accept that I'd actually been ill today, rather than just kind of crap. Accepting that I couldn't realistically have done any work suddenly took away a whole burden of background guilt about 'taking the day off'.
I'm not sure if, now that I've finally come to this point, it will stick. So, this post is partly here to remind myself in the future that it's actually not the usual state of affairs for me to want to do nothing and not move for the day - and when it happens it means that I'm probably ill.
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