soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2014-11-17 08:25 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2014-11-17 08:25 pm
Entry tags:
Life update and being an adult
I feel like such an adult these days! It is a weird feeling.
(for the record, being an adult doesn't preclude making terrible life choices in the very recent past, cf my decision last night to stay up till past 1 am on a work night reading extremely pointless crap on the internet and as a result getting several hours less sleep than I need, and waking up in the morning hating everything because I just cannot function on limited sleep the way I managed to back in my university days.)
But the point is: I am CAPABLE of being a responsible person in ways I never have been before. And it is such a fabulous feeling.
CONTEXT:
Okay so three and a half years ago, right around the time I was about to finish my university degree, I was hit by a car and got a concussion.
So. You know. There were the results of that. Concussions do not do wonders for one's ability to be a capable human being.
But then as I slowly recovered from the concussion I realized that I just wasn't getting the energy back that I used to have in my pre-concussion days.
And since then I've been operating on appallingly few spoons on a day-to-day basis. Like, to a terribly life-restricting level. My life was not a great deal more than, like, going to work and then coming home to collapse on the couch and mindlessly read mediocre fanfiction. (good fanfiction took too much effort for a weeknight.)
It was not uncommon for me to come home from work and tell my sister not to talk to me because I had used up all my spoons and the very thought of having to communicate to any extent with another person was overwhelming enough to make me begin sobbing. I couldn't schedule more than maybe one not-very-big thing per weekend because otherwise I probably wouldn't have anything left to go to work on Monday morning.
I had better days sometimes too, but the overall picture of my life was "FML THERE ARE THINGS I WANT TO DO AND THINGS I HAVE TO DO AND I JUST CAN'T MANAGE TO DO ANY OF THEM."
And I just...assumed that this was the new normal, that my brain had gotten messed up by the concussion to a degree that I just couldn't handle having anything of a life anymore, and this was what I had to look forward to for the rest of my life.
But then a few months ago I had a blood test done that indicated I had wayyyyy low iron levels, which is not good for a person. Because GUESS WHAT, low iron causes low energy!!! So I went on heavy-duty iron supplements to fix that problem.
I have gotten up to actually reasonable iron levels these days, and there are hardly words to convey the difference this has made in my life.
So I can hang out with friends, and I can go to weekly potlucks, and I can (usually) actually wash dishes when they need to be washed, and I can have the tidiest bedroom I have ever had in my entire life, and I can clean my apartment regularly and take singing lessons and go out on errands that need doing and start working through my to-do list of things that really need to get done and all sorts of other things.
And I can do these things and NOT have to go lock myself in my bedroom to cry myself to sleep afterwards! I don't have to be doing a constant cost-benefit analysis of whether doing a thing I want will wreck my life too much in the following days! I don't have days where I have to ask myself whether the responsible thing to do is call in sick to work because I don't have the spoons to handle it!
Basically: for the first time in my life I am experiencing the conjunction of being mature enough to be able to be responsible for my life, and being physically/mentally capable of following through on that responsibility.
IT IS THE BEST.
I AM SO HAPPY.
(I am still not perfect. SO not perfect. I still have my brainweasels and I probably always will. And I will never be the get-up-and-go kind of person who's happiest when super busy. But. My level of functioning is unbelievable compared to where it was a few months ago, and I now have a future ahead of me of having an actual life that contains more than just dragging through work and coming home to find ways of wasting time until I can go to bed. And it is beautiful.)
(for the record, being an adult doesn't preclude making terrible life choices in the very recent past, cf my decision last night to stay up till past 1 am on a work night reading extremely pointless crap on the internet and as a result getting several hours less sleep than I need, and waking up in the morning hating everything because I just cannot function on limited sleep the way I managed to back in my university days.)
But the point is: I am CAPABLE of being a responsible person in ways I never have been before. And it is such a fabulous feeling.
CONTEXT:
Okay so three and a half years ago, right around the time I was about to finish my university degree, I was hit by a car and got a concussion.
So. You know. There were the results of that. Concussions do not do wonders for one's ability to be a capable human being.
But then as I slowly recovered from the concussion I realized that I just wasn't getting the energy back that I used to have in my pre-concussion days.
And since then I've been operating on appallingly few spoons on a day-to-day basis. Like, to a terribly life-restricting level. My life was not a great deal more than, like, going to work and then coming home to collapse on the couch and mindlessly read mediocre fanfiction. (good fanfiction took too much effort for a weeknight.)
It was not uncommon for me to come home from work and tell my sister not to talk to me because I had used up all my spoons and the very thought of having to communicate to any extent with another person was overwhelming enough to make me begin sobbing. I couldn't schedule more than maybe one not-very-big thing per weekend because otherwise I probably wouldn't have anything left to go to work on Monday morning.
I had better days sometimes too, but the overall picture of my life was "FML THERE ARE THINGS I WANT TO DO AND THINGS I HAVE TO DO AND I JUST CAN'T MANAGE TO DO ANY OF THEM."
And I just...assumed that this was the new normal, that my brain had gotten messed up by the concussion to a degree that I just couldn't handle having anything of a life anymore, and this was what I had to look forward to for the rest of my life.
But then a few months ago I had a blood test done that indicated I had wayyyyy low iron levels, which is not good for a person. Because GUESS WHAT, low iron causes low energy!!! So I went on heavy-duty iron supplements to fix that problem.
I have gotten up to actually reasonable iron levels these days, and there are hardly words to convey the difference this has made in my life.
So I can hang out with friends, and I can go to weekly potlucks, and I can (usually) actually wash dishes when they need to be washed, and I can have the tidiest bedroom I have ever had in my entire life, and I can clean my apartment regularly and take singing lessons and go out on errands that need doing and start working through my to-do list of things that really need to get done and all sorts of other things.
And I can do these things and NOT have to go lock myself in my bedroom to cry myself to sleep afterwards! I don't have to be doing a constant cost-benefit analysis of whether doing a thing I want will wreck my life too much in the following days! I don't have days where I have to ask myself whether the responsible thing to do is call in sick to work because I don't have the spoons to handle it!
Basically: for the first time in my life I am experiencing the conjunction of being mature enough to be able to be responsible for my life, and being physically/mentally capable of following through on that responsibility.
IT IS THE BEST.
I AM SO HAPPY.
(I am still not perfect. SO not perfect. I still have my brainweasels and I probably always will. And I will never be the get-up-and-go kind of person who's happiest when super busy. But. My level of functioning is unbelievable compared to where it was a few months ago, and I now have a future ahead of me of having an actual life that contains more than just dragging through work and coming home to find ways of wasting time until I can go to bed. And it is beautiful.)
no subject
That is such great and wonderful news! Yay! I've been anaemic before, and yeah, I know what you mean. It just makes everything way too hard.
no subject
no subject
no subject
... also, on a side note, I am very glad you mentioned iron, because I've been incredibly low-energy lately and I know that I have a tendency towards anemia (to life-threatening levels just a year and a half ago), so I'm going to add some iron supplements back into my daily routine and see if that helps. So thank you very much for mentioning that!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject