So I ran across an article about pain sensitivity and its relationship to mindfulness. Zeidan et al (see Library) did a study that essentially took people who did not practice or study meditation and categorized them as “mindful” people or not using assessments that I have to look into. Then they gave them pain and measured how their brains reacted to the pain (heat).

In short, people who were “mindful” were less affected by the pain, both in how they rated the pain and with physical brain reactions to the pain.

Zeidan et al define “trait mindfulness” as ” the innate propensity to be aware of the present moment in a non-reactive manner.” This is something I’ve become aware of in cognitive behavioral therapy, and also in how I deal with pain, but only in a way. I’ve always said ignore it. It’s not real or it’s not an indication of something actually wrong with me, so just let it go. Accept it, move on. In a way that’s mindfulness. Essentially it’s saying, be conscious of what’s going on around you and accept it without reacting to it. The “non-reactive manner” is an important part of the equation. So if you are able to do that – mindfulness – then your pain centers deactivate or depress and you feel less pain, not only as subjectively reported, but also your brain activates differently and sends a different type of signal to your body. I immediately thought of the people who can walk on hot coals or lay on nail beds. What I didn’t know was that the brain reacts differently with that kind of willful mindfulness to reduce the pain on a physical level.

One thing that jumped out at me, however, is that for the trial subjects, the researchers eliminated anyone with ongoing or chronic pain. So step two is needed, I think, to determine whether mindfulness works on people with chronic pain too. The authors were willing, however, to go out on a limb and note that people who are not mindful of their chronic pain tend to abuse opioids and alcohol. Okay, they were referencing someone else’s work that I have to find now, so I’ll give them that. My question is, since they eliminated studying chronic pain to determine the power of the mind over the brain, do the brains of people with chronic pain react the same way with mindfulness? Maybe it does but on a lesser scale? Maybe people who have chronic pain can’t practice mindfulness to the level needed to reduce pain? I doubt it. But I would be interested in comparing between two groups, those who practice mindfulness with chronic pain and those who practice without.

One of my pet peeves for several years now is the tendency for doctors to look at my weight and say, essentially, that it’s my problem. I’ll acknowledge it’s not healthy – at my heaviest I’ve been about 235. I know it’s bad for the joints that have arthritis in them (back and knees), which adds to my pain issues. Last night in the pool during AquaMixx, I had significant pain in my knees moving through the exercises. I also know I feel sluggish when I weigh too much. It’s a catch-22 of not being able to exercise because I don’t feel good because I weigh too much when exercising can help reduce weight which would help me move.

I acknowledge all that. What my issue is, however, is that doctors tend to dismiss chronic pain when weight is involved. I can say definitively when I was 16 and skinny, I still had pain. And I’ve had pain throughout gaining and losing weight. I have had both an increase in weight and pain the last couple years – is it a chicken and the egg syndrome? After all, I have a double whammy now. I’m over 50 and I’m overweight. Ding ding ding, of course I have pain, right? No.

The pain in my hands right now is very much like the pain in my knees when my arthritis bites me. Do I have arthritis in my hands? No. The pain in my shoulders when I hug my husband too long is very much the same as the pain in my back, which is from slipped discs and arthritis. Do I have arthritis in my shoulders? No. I have several days a month when I feel like I have the flu without the fever, vomiting/diarrhea. Do I have the flu? No. When my cat walks on me (let’s say the skinny one, not the tubby one) it feels like he’s stepping on bruises or creating bruises with every step. Am I bruised all the way up my legs, side, stomach, back, arms? No. All that’s fibromyalgia. Not age. Not weight. Fibromyalgia.

So I’ll take the weight-loss challenge, and let’s see what happens to mobility (my primary goal), pain, and fatigue. I don’t own a scale, but I’m very sensitive to weight in terms of how my clothes fit. And I have access to a physician’s scale at work when I notice that my clothes feel different. I don’t like to consciously try to lose weight because I tend to get frustrated and just binge, and then gain and it’s a mess. But here are my goals for losing weight:

1. small dinners, trying not to skip them, but I get home late and eat dinner late, so I need to really just have a yogurt or something very light. Maybe do vegan at night.
2. Eat normally during the day at work – I don’t eat that much anyway, but to keep satisfied, allow myself to be happy eating at work.
3. Don’t deprive myself, but encourage myself to cut back on carbs. Now I want a bowl of pasta. But when I do have carbs, I’ll have whole grains. I don’t eat much bread anyway, but I do love pasta.
4. Continue to get to the pool at least once a week for AquaMixx. If possible go twice with the second time running laps in the pool.
5. Add daily stretches at home. Leg lifts, bending, whatever I can do now that I have my own space. I’ll work on creating a daily routine and I’ll get my yoga mat out of the trunk of my car.
6. Track my progress. It’s easy to start something, but if I’m doing this on my own, I don’t stay accountable and it’s easy to just slide back into old habits. I’ll track progress at least once a week to be able to be accountable to myself.
7. Don’t blame myself for slipping. No guilt. No scolding myself. Only encouragement.

It’s not easy, especially when I’m not convinced that there will be a significant difference in the way I feel. But being mindful of the food I eat and being diligent in exercising will definitely help me feel better. The question here is – will losing weight help fibromyalgia pain?

Continuing with One Year in Review 2019: FIbromyalgia (Atzeni et al), and looking at the section on treatment. As a reminder, I started this blog because going to an extreme exercise bootcamp seemed to ease my symptoms rather than kill me, as I presumed bootcamp would. I found it not to be sustainable primarily because of arthritis, and so have tried yoga, walking, swimming, Aqua Zumba, and now I’m going to an aerobic water class called AquaMixx. There have been times between each of these endeavors that I have not continued exercising. Either the class ends or life happens. Each time I stop doing exercises, I go backwards to worse than where I started. It’s not starting at square one, it’s starting at square -5. So I can say definitively, whatever exercise works, it requires continuous practice. That’s been my best hope. Meds haven’t worked for me, and I’m sensitive to most of the ones I’ve tried.

However, it was interesting to see that most of the treatment section addressed meds, and the combination of meds that may have some affect on symptoms. If class 3 fibromyalgiacs generally have some chemical sensitivity, it doesn’t seem like that’s the way to go. My opinion. They address the basics and combinations of the basics. And they talk about CBD and opioids. The bottom line on all of it, however, is that because there’s such a variability of how fibro plays out in individual patients, that there is not a be-all, end-all pharmacologic solution. Instead, it looks like combining meds has had the most luck. This of course would require a lot of experimentation until someone puts together a chart of fibro symptoms and medications and refines the likely results as a starting point. I’m not sure about anybody else – I can’t afford the trial and error method, and I don’t want a cauldron of pills to stay compliant with. The side-effects are too great, and they usually affect work as well as my personal life. And I can’t afford it.

So I turned to the non-pharmacological section, which they assert seems to have better impact on symptoms and quality of life than drugs. They discuss behavioral therapies to help people learn to move – to be aware of their movements: Basic Body Awareness Therapy (BBAT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I can attest to CBT – I’m a graduate, and a mindfulness advocate. I suspect BBAT has the mindfulness element to it but with a stronger connection to the physical. I’d like to check that out a bit.

I was surprised when I read, “physical activity does not seem to influence pain sensitivity” and then a dive back to drugs. It’s probably true that exercise doesn’t change the way we feel pain, but I firmly believe it reduces the amount of pain that we feel. Instead they go into cryotherapy, mud-bathing, electrical nerve stimulation, laser therapy, and pulsed electro-magnetic fields, and other such stuff. I must be becoming quite cynical. These all would require a substantial amount of time and money to get whatever relief these treatments may give. These are not cures – they’re symptom chasers. And expensive ones at that. So if that’s the direction medicine is going as of 2019, I’m not impressed and not particularly hopeful.

I can do better on my own, I think. I’m in the pool once a week for AquaMixx. It kicks my butt, but overall I feel better. I need to lose weight to take the strain off the arthritis in my knees and back. I have to focus. My goal is to stay mobile. Knees and back are a key component to that. Tonight in the pool, my knees were a-talking. So goal: weight loss, and stay in the pool. Weight loss is tricky, but I’ll give it a go. It would be nice to be able to bend in half again without adjusting for my belly. So maybe that will be my goal, not really weight-loss, but girth-loss. When I can bend in half without adjusting for my belly, then success!

The review article, One Year in Review 2019: Fibromyalgia (Atzeni et al), discusses four classes of fibromyalgia:

Class One: widespread generalized pain in specific regions of the body

Class Two: Greater severity of pain and more regional involvment

Class Three: Even greater severity of pain plus related to sleep disorders and possibly chemical sensitivity

Class Four: fibromyalgia becomes “secondary fibromyalgia” with primary diagnoses, such as multiple sclerosis or lupus, etc.

Atzeni et al does discuss the possibility that these “classes” could also be progressions. Indeed, for myself, I can identify class one as my teen years, class two as my 30s and 40s, and now I’m firmly in class three in my 50s with definite sleep disorder and multiple chemical sensitivity.

If class four becomes the fourth stage of a progression of the disease and suddenly the doctor can identify a primary diagnosis (my money would be on something rheumatic), I have to wonder: Is fibro actually just a “resting” state for these other primary disorders? In other words, let’s say I have lupus, but it’s never been in a stage that has been detectable. It’s in my system, it messes with my immunology, inflammatory markers, etc, but not at the level that I can have a test and someone say, yep, it’s lupus. Now suddenly I turn 60 and the doctor says, well heck you have lupus. I’m no longer in the resting stage, I’m in the active stage.

And then my primary fibromyalgia becomes secondary fibromyalgia. my resting lupus becomes active lupus with secondary fibro. My body has had 40+ years to become sensitized to pain, for fibro to settle in and do whatever brain function or molecular changes it’s made. Now what?

I must be feeling a little catastrophic today. I’ve said for years that I didn’t think I wanted to  live well into old age. I feel 80 already. I’ve also said I’d rather the doctor would just find something he or she could just remove. Tumor, whatever. If fibro has stages, do I really want a primary diagnosis now that I probably wouldn’t be able to take any of the meds that would help? Plus, those primary diagnoses have limited treatment. I don’t know, really. What will be will be. I’ve also had 40+ years training myself how to keep going. And it’s just a theory anyway.

With the start of 2020 and a new decade that can’t be worse than the last 3 years globally, and with being moved into my new “forever” home with my own library to curl up in and pretend the world doesn’t actually exist, I’m trying to get back into the swing of this again. I have a stack of new articles to read, most about pain rating systems or pain classification/characterization. I am wondering (again) why doctors even ask us to rate pain? I mean pain is what characterizes our condition. It’s there! Asking us to rate it tells them nothing, at least not as far as I can tell. There must be a more meaningful measure for how a person with fibro is doing overall. Anyway, before I start that, I’m looking at an article from Atzeni et al, “One Year in Review: Fibromyalgia.” I know, it sounds riveting, doesn’t it? It actually is.

The article is divided up by 1) etiology – why does fibro happen to people? 2) diagnosis – how can physicians diagnose it? 3) treatment.  I’m going to look at etiology first.

When I quit working on this project last year (or the year before?), I was looking at the idea of something in the skin as a cause for fibro. I didn’t get my head around it, but as I was sorting through articles to study, I set aside a pile having to do with skin. As it turns out, in 2019, there was not a lot of work done on the cause for fibro, but there were studies done dealing with “small fiber neuropathies.” I don’t have a clear idea of what that means, but it’s essentially pain, mostly in the feet and hands. Researchers went a little further last year, however, and looked at large fiber neuropathies too. The reason the results catches my eye is that 90% of their test subjects with “only” fibromyalgia (no other diseases like diabetes, etc) tested positive to “demyelinating and/or axonal sensory-motor polyneuropathy,” which is a fairly fancy way of saying messed up nerve cells, nerve fibers, and nerve coverings.  Messed up nerves. That may seem like a duh moment, BUT it’s rare, in all the readings that I’ve done to have such a high percentage of subjects with fibro agreeing on anything.

Importantly the non-fibro control group all tested negative, except for those who had carpal tunnel syndrome.

The testing for this was done with a skin ankle biopsy, so I’m glad I bundled up the articles on the skin that I did. I’ll definitely have to look closer. In short, despite all the need-more-testing-protests that you always read, this is solidly a potential thing. But what thing, exactly? There isn’t really a stated cause for demyelinating and/or axonal sensory-motor polyneuropathy either.

However, if a physician can do a biopsy to determine whether or not a person has fibromyalgia, there are a couple things that could benefit the patient. First, the patient can get a solid, definitive diagnosis. It could slow down patients who hop from doctor to doctor hoping for an answer. Second, physicians could regard people with fibromyalgia as a patient with a solid, definitive diagnosis. When there’s a solid definitive diagnosis, treatments follow much more rapidly and readily and with less resistance. Fibro patients may not feel like they’re flapping in the wind so much. Maybe we won’t sense the reluctance to talk with us about what’s happening to our bodies. Doctors may feel less like they’re making guesses. To me all that’s positive. It doesn’t change anything in the long run, at least for now, but it’s positive.

The single most difficult problem with fibromyalgia or any chronic pain condition, other than the relentless pain  itself, is figuring out when to seek help for that pain or any discomfort or unusual sensations your body may be offering. I have a general rule – don’t go to the ER unless I’m unconscious or hemorrhaging. I’m actually more reasonable than that, but it’s close. Another rule, don’t go to the doctor unless something has persisted at least a couple weeks and/or it’s interfering with work. So many times, I’ve waited and waited and put up with problems, only to go to the doctor, have them find nothing, and then the pains resolve all by themselves. Money and time wasted. At least, however, I know when I feel a certain set of pains that I can wait. That’s the pain that was thoroughly checked out and it was nothing. It will go away. the problem is that being really unable to seek help when I feel like I might need it causes some serious anxiety. After all, in 2002 I had a massive pulmonary embolism that came very near to killing me. I had waited months before getting help.

Funny thing is the anxiety comes more in NOT finding something than thinking the doctor MIGHT find something. I’ve said more than once in all seriousness, I’d prefer the doctor find SOMETHING, a tumor, anything that they have a shot at fixing, rather than find nothing and give me the “we don’t know what it is you’re feeling and we can’t do anything for you; we understand how difficult it is [no you don’t] but it’s not x, y, z and you’re on your own” talk. I love doctors, I really do. I find 99% of them wonderful human beings – incredibly healthy human beings – who really do want to help. I’m a source of frustration, but I’ve only had one or two just shut down on me when they figure out they can’t figure me out. Maybe my anxiety comes in the possibility of seeing that shut down. After all, in 2002 shortly before I woke up on my bathroom floor with a massive pulmonary embolism, a doctor shut down when he saw the fibro diagnosis in my chart and sent me home without taking me seriously when I said something was wrong. I saw it in his eyes.

So this weekend I spent the days trying to find the hair that was hanging in front of my left eye. I have short hair. My bangs don’t hang in my eyes. Maybe it was an eyelash. Nope. So yesterday morning sitting in my office trying to push the non-existent hair out of my eye, I struggled with the question. To call or not to call. I wasn’t horribly uncomfortable. I just knew something was wrong. I called, and the ophthalmologist’s office said they’ll triage my question and they’d get back to me. I hung up and went on with my normal day, expecting not much. About 15 minutes later, “Can you come in right now?” Huh, sure.

Five hours of testing and imaging later, of course there was no detached retina. But there is a spot, an odd spot called a cotton wool spot. It’s somewhere in my eye, looks like a bit of cotton fluff, right near my optic nerve. It’s not that big of a deal, but it is usually an indication of a more severe underlying condition, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. I have neither. My BP was 138/89 yesterday even after bright flashing lights in dilated eyes. Plus, the imaging of my left is a little blotchy or patchy compared to my right eye, a condition (I can’t remember what the doctor called it) which could indicate that my eye isn’t getting proper nutrition or blood flow. That, he said, could be more serious. Not enough nutrition or blood flow could lead to blindness.  So he went to discuss with a specialist who wasn’t quite as concerned as he was, but they decided to run blood tests to be sure of what was going on.

My surprise at the doctors actually finding something melted away into that familiar resignation. Blood tests. There’s never anything wrong with my blood. They’re going to find nothing and then say, well the cotton wool spot will resolve eventually; we’ll keep an eye on it. Indeed my CBC panel came back perfectly normal. My inflammation marker is up, but that doesn’t surprise me or my stiff and swollen joints. There are more results to come, but I’m not holding my breath. The doctor will call when they all come in and say, er uh, well there’s nothing significant in your blood work. So we’ll just observe. Call us if you notice any changes. And then I’ll notice a change and I’ll sit there thinking, is this a change? should I call? will I just be wasting more time and money? It’s like a merry-go-round of indecision.

For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been working through depression. Counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, antidepressants. My counselor, a wonderful person who will be retiring in October, has pulled me through some massive issues; I’ve learned to make use of the cognitive behavioral tools so I no longer feel the need to never express anger or to shut myself up physically and emotionally; and after several attempts at antidepressant therapy, I’ve gotten on a very low dose of Prozac which I’ll be on probably for the rest of my life. How do I know the Prozac works? I went off it when I felt too normal to be on an antidepressant. It took months to regain balance. When I’m not on that very low, maintenance dose of Prozac, I feel a vortex nip at my toes trying to pull me down into a whirling pit of inhumanity. That’s a bit dramatic, but anyone who is destined for lifelong Prozac or Zoloft or whatever understands that ever lurking threat of loss of balance. I picture the vortex in my head when it threatens me. I imagine myself in an empty room, an infinite room – the walls may be white, but they’re so vast I don’t feel them. But in the corner of that infinite room on the floor is a small, ever moving, ever changing whirling inverted vortex. It’s sneaky. It can reach out and try to pull me in. It can lurk trying to trip me up or let me fall in. I have to constantly be vigilant so it doesn’t trick me into oblivion. More drama.

The past couple of years has been both bad and good. I’ve been maintaining, working at being the person I want to be. At the same time, however, I have not been taking care of myself the way I should be taking care of myself. I’ve been living in my parent’s basement while we work at putting in a new house. It’s not easy living in my parent’s basement. I haven’t taken the time to write or even read the pile of books waiting for me because I feel so temporary, in the air, displaced. My space is not my own, and I never knew how important having my own space was until now. I’ve been locked into waiting mode. In the meantime, I’ve worked to keep my relationship with my husband alive, to keep a relationship with my parents so I still have parents when we finally leave; I’ve worked at everyone except myself. I’ve gained weight (a lot), and I have not been exercising. Every year pain and mobility becomes more of an issue. The pain increases and the mobility decreases. That’s been an exponential crisis this last year and a half in my parent’s basement.

This week the house is starting to get built. It’s a modular, so the house itself is in a factory somewhere getting built, but we have excavation and dirt and next week we’ll have cement. We’ve waited so long for this.

Perhaps being inspired by our new dirt, I’ve gotten back in the pool. This time, I’m taking a class once a week called Aqua Mixx, which is a combination of core exercises, aerobic exercises, and “weights” in the pool. I like it. I’m also getting in the pool once a week and running. That’s been interesting – difficult. When I get out of the pool after running for a half hour or 45 minutes, I can barely walk. It helps to get in the whirlpool afterwards. I’m sore the next day, but pleasantly so. I’m going to try this combination through the end of the year at least, twice a week. Staying to exercise after a 10-hr work day makes for very long days, and adding the drive-time and my current levels of fatigue, “difficult” is an understatement. But it makes me feel good to be doing something again. Good enough that I could open up my little laptop and write this.

New house, new goals, new hope. I still have to be patient, but more importantly, I have to be more mindful of my own needs, physical, emotional, mental. I can do this.

I don’t want to turn this blog into just a random daily diary of woes. That won’t help anyone but me. However, I need a spur to continue. I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been eating well. I haven’t been exercising. I have been anxious and depressed. I have been worrying about everyone and everything except myself. I write that after using “I” or “me” in every sentence. I I I me me me… It’s a fear, to be so self-centered. When you wake up every morning feeling every muscle and joint aching and you’re more tired than when you went to sleep, it’s hard not to be self-centered. It’s a danger, to be so self-centered. When you focus on those aches, the fatigue, the despair, the anxiety, it enhances it, and the rest of the world no longer seems relevant or important.

There has to be a fine line…somewhere.

After all, if you aren’t mindful of your own needs – wait, back up. After all, if I’m not mindful of my own needs, I can’t be healthy. If I’m not healthy, I can’t help anyone else. Mindfulness is an issue lately. It seems I’m helping everyone except myself.

1. At work I help the program directors, the residents, secretaries, the people wandering lost in the hallways. My only escape is to close my office door and hope no one knocks while I’m at lunch.
2. At home I struggle to find time alone – which is why I’m writing this at 5:26 AM – and when I insist on time alone, I struggle to feel okay about insisting on it. I’ve lost my truly down weekends, when I could close the door on the world and regenerate. Would I trade Terry in to get those weekends back, heck no. But right now we’re living in a basement waiting to build a house in the spring. It’s more than Terry and me and the snuggle bunnies. That perfect silence, when I choose what I allow, when I choose any and all intrusions into any of my senses, is gone. I’m not regenerating, and I can feel my energy draining out of me.
3. In my finances, I make more now than I have ever made, but I’m struggling, again because I’m not living just for myself. It’s too easy to just say okay, I’ll take care of it, give in, spend too much on other people’s needs, and forget my own. Retirement is a pipe dream. The house is my dream, but if I were still alone, I would still be in my little broken nest. Sometimes I feel invaded and with that comes resentment. Sometimes I see broken promises and with that comes disappointment.
4. In my country, I feel powerless, confounded, absolute fear. In many ways, the last two years of a bizarre, unthinkable government is an impetus for the state that I’m in now, more than anything else. I’ve been thrown back into the horrible days of my youth in Chicago, haunting echoes of people shrieking at each other, epithets that I refuse to use. I find my own sensibilities challenged – I used to be frustrated by paranoia about Russia (just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you). I find myself struggling with a deep-seated prejudice of my own: old white men. I just want them to  shut up and retire, go play checkers in the park. I want the government to stop spending money. Wait, I’m not a conservative. All my worries about the republican party have come to fruition. No, it’s not the republican party anymore, but they have proven they are definitely not family-values, small-government, fiscally sound. You can tell, I’m overwhelmed by the state of my country. But I’m letting that pressure – things I can’t fix unless I go into politics myself – overtake all other considerations.

Lately I have let the world invade, my family and friends invade, my colleagues invade, everyone except myself. Mindfulness is a pipe dream. And as mindfulness goes down the pipes, so does my well-being. As my well-being disintegrates, so does my ability to help anyone, myself, my friends, my family, my colleagues, strangers.

Starting by writing this blog, something I haven’t done since October last year, I’m going to babystep back into wellness. One step at a time. I don’t expect to ever wake up rested and painfree, but I can work on waking up content and grateful for all the wonderful things in my life instead of blind (or suffering macular degeneration) to all the people who are there for me, who aren’t trying to make my life more difficult or stressful. I can wake up with gratitude. I’ll babystep myself back into gratitude.

It’s been a long time since I’ve added anything to this blog. I haven’t given up, and unfortunately I’m not “cured.” I have good days and bad days. I go to work on both and keep moving forward every day. The arthritis in my knees has flared a lot, so I’ve been doing some targeted PT for that. I needed a break from reading medical articles and thinking so much about what is going on in my body. But most of all, I’ve been struggling psychologically. I know I have to take care of myself, but there are so many people in the world suffering so much more than me. My problems (physical, financial, etc) are not even a drop in the ocean. I’ve been fighting with feeling powerless and demoralized by the political scene in America. I’ve been fighting with depression and just wanting to quit…everything. I’ve been fighting to look around myself at the good people I meet every day and to remember who they are and why they are: Who I am and why I am. I’ve been struggling to believe in the future, to believe in the essential goodness of life, the world, and people. I’ve been in search of my own purpose. This blog and the research that has gone into it is important to me, and I will continue to work on it one day. Until then, I’m working on mindfulness, counting my blessings, staying on my feet. It is what it is, and that’s all it can be. Ever forward.

I’m constantly amazed at people who don’t flinch at loud noises, who can spend a full day talking and listening and still have the energy and brainpower to talk in the evening, who don’t flinch at bright lights, who can be on their feet all day and still go dancing at night without swollen ankles and feet, who can work on their computers all day and still read a book at night, who can work all day and come home and clean the house, cook the food, wash the dishes, talk to their spouses. I grew up in the age of the Superwoman, when women went from being “housewives” to being wage-earners without changing much of their “housewively” duties. Remember the old commercial, “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man…” Yeah, I’m not like that. I’m a wimp. I can bring home the bacon, but it better be precooked, and my  husband better plan on serving it up for himself because I’m going to be crawling through the front door and into bed. Thank goodness times have changed.

So I just spent three days at a conference. It was an excellent conference – Orlando, sun, warmth… 3500 attendees, traffic, noise, lights, talking. I’ve known for years that I’m an introvert. I can function. I’m not actually phobic – I leave my house, talk to strangers, enjoy people. But so often I get drained. Overwhelmed. My ability to function declines sharply as noise and activity around me increases. Some people thrive – I don’t. And I miss out. Too often. After working all day, it’s very seldom I manage at most dinner and a movie with a friend. After being at a conference all day for three days, I managed one dinner out with friends. I missed out the other two nights as my energy (physical and mental) reserves dwindled. Sleeping has not revitalized me at this point, simply because I’m so incredibly drained. I wanted to write about this last night, but I couldn’t access my vocabulary.

I wasn’t always like this, but every year exhaustion closes in on me. I make more and more choices, compromises in terms of where I expend energy, how I can be most productive, what my priorities are for productivity. I find myself envying, straightup envying, people who don’t have to contemplate those compromises, who can do as they please when they please and just sleep off exhaustion. And I’m starting to contemplate more and more how long I’m going to be able to make those choices and how soon my body will make them for me.