When The Chips Are Down.

I often start writing a blog entry and then delete it. It feels a bit self-indulgent to pour my thoughts out onto a blank page, assuming that someone somewhere will want to read them. 

I'm struggling, so I'm blogging. Suffering in silence is lonely, trying to cope alone is hard and to be honest, ultimately, it makes me miserable. 

I do my best to stay positive but some days it’s just seems impossible. Today is one of those days. It’s been a tough couple of weeks; I'm experiencing a bad flare which has lasted longer than usual and it’s really knocked me on my arse.

So what’s my problem? It’s not so much the pain, although the constant hurting tends to grind me down after a while (today, just sitting still hurts…I kid you not!). It’s the fatigue that I find hardest to deal with because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it except rest, whilst keeping reasonably mobile in order to keep my body moving so it doesn't seize up, and just wait it out. I’m just waiting for my energy to return so that I can get back to some sort of normality. But what’s normal? I have absolutely no idea. I assume that normal means no pain and a reasonable level of energy, but that’s not a reality for me, I deal with varying levels of pain and there’s rarely a day when I don’t have to cope with it to some degree. And then there’s the fatigue, the feeling of complete exhaustion, when even the smallest task seems to sap what little energy I have, even when I've not done very much.

I've not been able to run at all this week which makes matters worse, running has become my way of coping, a way of feeling like I'm winning, beating my illness into submission. I've been walking but it’s surprised me just how tired I’ve felt as a result, so today I'm resting. It’s so boring!

I won’t go on and on about how I feel, I won’t be telling you anything you've not heard before. I just needed to say that actually, I'm not coping very well today; I feel utterly miserable and in this moment, it feels like it’s never going to get any better.