I just got back from 5 days in SoCal to attend Bear’s brother’s wedding. The wedding itself was awesome as Bear’s bro is truly in love and Bear’s new sis is the best thing to happen to that family since yours truly, but the three days leading up to the wedding were crazy stressful with all the last minute wedding prep.
I love Bear’s family, so it was great seeing all the aunts and uncles and cousins and so on, Bear got to talk a LOT of shop with people who may be able to finally give him a break, and I worked my butt off until I was so sick I threw up all night long.
I just can’t get it through my head that I have a crippling disease. I know what I’m capable of when I’m healthy. When I’m 100%, I am a machine. I am a multi-tasking, structure-creating, world-organizing, three-job-having, anal-retentive machine. So I expect myself to be able to function at that level of productivity at all times. And then I have to back out because I don’t have the strength to sit in a chair, and that just ups the flake factor that I fight against so hard that I take on too much in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle.
I try to plan three times as much as a normal person would to make up for this. I have a strict schedule for household chores, I plan and plan and plan so that I usually have no more than one obligation a day. If I have a meeting for church, I clear the rest of my schedule so I can be a functioning human being skating by on adrenaline and will power and then crash when I get home. The night of the wedding my teeth started chattering and wouldn’t stop for an hour. Bear had to hold my jaw down because my teeth were hurting. I asked my doctor (my father-in-law) about it and he said that was my body letting off adrenaline like a whistling kettle lets off steam. I had pushed myself so hard to make it through, that by the end of the night when I finally allowed myself to relax, my body completely spazzed out.
Now that we’re back I have to get caught up on the obligations I missed. I don’t have kids, I don’t work, I NEVER leave my house for vacation if it’s not clean, so the obligations were not tremendous. But nevertheless, I was completely overwhelmed by them because I felt the pressure of undone things just weighing on me. I tried to explain to Bear how I felt and I told him I felt like it was finals week. He gave me this look like I just told him I was taking him to the planet Zarnon.
Somehow I managed to do it. I did three loads of laundry; created a binder, updated the calendar, made a phone list, and researched future activities for my church volunteer work; returned the rental car; went to the post office; returned the library books; paid the bills and bought printer ink. To a normal person, that probably sounds like one full day. For me, that was two days of such enormous productivity that I feel like I just climbed Everest.
I’m starting to be able to relax now, but I still have 8 books waiting to be reviewed and a whole bunch of organizing to do around my studio, not to mention all the stuff I’ve been meaning to ebay for weeks now, but I’m just not going to think about that today.