Exeter. Chronic fatigue plus this, careful pacing, and I want to talk about the thing that makes this circle different from the tiredness conversations elsewhere on the site.
Post-exertional malaise. For anybody reading who does not have it: it means that when I overdo something, the price is not paid that evening. It is paid two days later, and it is not tiredness, it is a whole-body crash where my legs ache and my brain fogs over and I cannot follow a conversation, and it lasts anywhere from a day to a fortnight. The delay is what makes it so hard to learn from, because the cause and the consequence are never in the same room.
Here is my current problem. Since about May I have had noticeably more good hours. I am not going to make claims about why — I will come back to that. But the effect has been that I keep spending them. A good Tuesday arrives and I clean the kitchen properly, or I walk further than I planned because it was pleasant, or I say yes to something on a Saturday. And then Thursday happens.
Three times this summer. Each time I have known perfectly well what I was doing while I was doing it.
What I want to ask the circle is not how to pace — I have had eight years of learning that and I could teach it. It is: how do you handle the psychology of having more capacity than you are allowed to use? Because the pacing I learned when I was very ill was easy in a bleak way. There was nothing to spend. Now there is, and I keep spending it, and I am starting to think that having a bit more is harder to manage than having none.
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