Sometimes a bad day is also a good day
Today I'd hoped to go to hydrotherapy, but unfortunately I was not in sufficiently good shape to go. This was disappointing, but a useful reminder of something important.
My physical illnesses and mental illnesses are separate things. They're by no means independent of each other, but they are different. Sometimes it's useful to be reminded of this, so here we are in rare blogland.
This morning I woke from my mid-morning nap feeling very weak and tired. But I know that how you feel when you just wake up is not always a reliable measure of one's actual well-being, so I gave myself 100 minutes to get in gear for hydrotherapy. I was pretty keen about it today, so that involved drinking rather a lot of coke. I drank, I stretched, I pottered/lurched about, and generally tried to wake up and find spoons. The body was having none of it, and when the deadline came I was disappointed to find I was still much too sore and tired to go. Experience told me that pushing on would be worse than pointless.
Bummer, no pool for me. Plan B, do laundry. I schlepped a load of washing into the machine and later hung it out to dry. I brought in the bins, and checked the letterbox. It was a triumph of activity over extremely unwilling flesh. A few hours later I brought the washing back in. A notably unspectacular day.
But here's the thing - I felt physically pretty damn awful, and disappointed that I hadn't made the pool, but it was OK. My brain happily shifted my plans about and didn't succumb to crushing despair. I like it when my brain doesn't succumb to crushing despair - no, really, you should try it. Writing this I'm far from clear-headed - actually my thoughts are getting more and more disorganised - but I'm feeling quite cheery. Cheery in a balanced-emotional-state kind of way, not an are-you-showing-signs-of-bipolar-excessive-happiness kind of way.
Tomorrow is another day. Friday is another day after that. I have modest preferences and priorities for what I might achieve in those two days, but if I don't, I don't.
Reading this back I feel I have completely failed to describe what it was I'd hoped to capture about today. But hey, that's OK. And that's probably it - a nicely balanced reaction to perfectly reasonable disappointment. Screw you, mental illness, I beat you today. Physical illness, I admit you got this one.