Every night, the same thing happens. I mean to blog, I really do, but then I sit down at my computer and I'm just too stinking tired to write very much.  All I want to do is go to bed, preferably for a very long time. Plan B is to see if I can chug some Animagus juice and become my cat.  It's pretty much the same, I'd say.

Having such a mismatch between my drive to get things done and the energy needed to carry them out is really frustrating.  Usually when I'm extremely fatigued, I'm either so driven by anxiety and OCD that I don't even ask if I have the energy, or I'm so depressed that I don't care if I get anything done.  I'm fundamentally a very driven person, and I usually can summon the energy to do what I need to do on a pretty consistent basis.

But over the past few weeks, I've just been utterly drained.  I rarely make it through the day without a nap.  I feel like all I do is eat, sleep, and work.  I've done some crochet, yes, and I do try to watch at least one TV show a day, even if I am catching up on email while watching.  And it figures my book club picked A Tale of Two Cities for this Saturday's meeting. This isn't a piece of literature that can be described as a "page turner." 

I easily slip into mopey, woe-is-me moods.  I feel like I have no confidence, not because I'm actually lacking in confidence or drive, but because I don't have the energy to summon confidence.  Screw life goals, I just want a nap.  I want my email to stop pinging me with new messages, I want my editors to stop requesting another set of changes.  I want to wander around Target and not worry about how much work I need to be doing.

I wish I could just accept the fact that doing the extra eating and recovery work means that I might not be able to function as well at work and that's okay.  But that doesn't come easily to me.  In fact, it doesn't really come at all.  I don't look at my grades in grad school in the depths of my ED and think "Imagine how well I could have done if I wasn't sick!"  No, I think that I should have done better and worked harder and maybe tried to get more studying done while spending hours on the elliptical machine.

I can tell myself that I'm doing the best I can, and even though I get that it's true, I also feel that this still isn't good enough.  And then I realize that I don't have the energy to try harder even if I could, so it doesn't really matter.  The spoon analogy does help here. I'm using extra spoons at mealtimes and on recovery stuff, so it makes sense that I have fewer to "use" with work and other things.

I guess the moral of the story is that I'm tired of always equating fatigue and proper rest with laziness.  And when you're constantly fatigued, it's a pretty crappy situation to find yourself in.