I accidentally spilled a deep and abiding truth today, and I have been thinking of it ever since. One of my dear friends asked me how I am, in light of all the complaining I've been doing in this space about how much my chronic conditions have been getting to me. At the moment she asked, I felt fabulous. Without reflecting too hard, I hit on exactly what was happening: I was around people. I told her so. And in a nutshell, that is the whole truth. When I'm interacting with people, whether at Rotary or my kids, my game group or my doctors, I feel fine. I am so caught up in smiling and talking that I enter a euphoria, and my pains and fatigue fade from my mind. It's only when I am still and quiet that the bad things return. I was conscious of it in the hour following that exchange with my friend. We went from talking over lunch, the big group of us, to quietly listening to the Rotary speaker (this time it was kind of a business meeting with our charity fund). As I sat there in the warm, quiet room, with the lights dimmed for a slideshow, I felt fatigue and pain start to creep back in. The mild headache that has not left me alone for months started to throb gently. I started thinking about how much I wanted a nap. And as soon as the lights came up and we started saying our goodbyes, I felt fine again.
I guess the key is to keep myself distracted. Maybe that is how I managed to work full time all those years. I kept busy. When I wasn't busy, work was agonizing. I was much happier when I was hopping around at the reference desk of the library, with a line of two or three people waiting for my help, than I ever was sitting alone in an office, waiting for a soldier to come in for education counseling. Too much time for self-reflection means too much time to run a systems check on my physical self.
Not sure where to go with this knowledge. Not to a full-time job, that's for sure. I don't have that much energy anymore. I guess grandkids get to be the beneficiaries of my need for interaction from here on out. Lucky them?
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