Mischa Fox

The unseasonable winter chill nipped my bones today. I’d forgotten my Voltaren (a prescribed painkiller) a few times this past week due to the warmer weather in northern Georgia this month. I’ve got a tendency to overlook it when my body feels good. Today I paid for it and needed to use a sick day from my day job to rest and recover.

For anyone new to my journals–I have hypermobility Ehlers-Danlos. My connective tissue (joints, cartilage, tendons, ligaments, skin, and the collagen that holds organs together) doesn’t form right. It’s stretchy and like a rubber band where its supposed to be tight like a steel cable.

Overexercise, under exercise, poor nutrition, bad sleep, a barometric pressure drop (like during a sudden storm), cold temperatures, humidity, missing medication, stress–basically any change in my body or environment causes a flareup of full body pain and chronic fatigue so severe I can’t stay sitting upright in a chair.

I am still in recovery from a severe episode that lasted most of last year due to not knowing I had the condition–and accidentally doing everything wrong I possibly could with it, damaging my tissues and grinding myself down to exhaustion. This means flareups happen very easily.

If I don’t catch them immediately on day one, instead of having a recovery period of 2-3 slow somewhat inactive days, I could be in bed for weeks. Which often means working my remote day job from my laptop while lying on the floor, and sleeping every remaining hour.

It’s frustrating as hell, since I love hiking, weightlifting, travel, yoga, and staying active. It’s hard for me to socialize, and my evenings and weekends as the years pass grow more and more into napping and recharging at home. It sucks, but… I’m trying to get used to it now that I’ve suffered the consequences.

In addition to the physical stuff, my creativity dries up. I don’t have the energy to type or paint or edit photos. Trying to move my fingers feels like pushing boulders up a mountain.

I can tell I overdid it the last few weeks, trying to get back into a more regular fitness schedule as the weather warms in Georgia… But between that and the excitement of returning to school… the stress of work… the stress of the political landscape…

I’ll be stuck in recovery mode for a bit.

I think I’ve gathered enough energy to get through the next two work days… but I also have a certificate course for school this weekend, which will mean a LOT more social interaction and travel than I’m used to. I fully expect to be stuck on my couch letting my internal batteries recharge for at least the next week.

Not happy about it.

Finishing 2000 words tonight feels like a tiny miracle.

It’s weird working on a rough draft from complete scratch again. Editing took so long (mostly because of school and last year’s health flareup that delayed both book editing and grad school) that this stage feels alien again.

I’m keeping my good humor and having a good laugh at some of what comes out. It doesn’t have to be great. But I DO have to keep trudging forward, one foot at a time. And remember that the first installment… I scrapped the beginning and rewrote it so many times I lost count.

This is normal.

Just get the words out. One at a time. Stumbling, falling, clumsy, clanking into walls. Make them pretty later. Rearrange them later. Write the scenes you know have to be in this one. Everything gets fixed in revision. You can delete entire chapters later.

Just don’t stop.

Because once school starts in May, due to the nature of how my neurodivergent brain adjusts to college, I won’t have the ability to write creatively. I’ll be able to revise and edit in small chunks as time allows, but I won’t be in the mindset to fight my way through new territory.

I also need to be very careful to keep everything in my environment and habits balanced to get through these last two semesters of college. (I will be using vacation to sleep extra and recover energy at junctures I know it will be busiest, which will help a lot.) I MUST stop this flareup this next week, and I MUST stay healthy and balanced for the following 60 days or school is going to destroy my body again.

Calculating my average of about 2200 words a night… and adjusting for the 7 days I have other obligations… I should wrap this draft up around the last week of April. As long as I stick to kicking SOMETHING out every day, even if I think in the moment it sucks. (We are all our own worst critics after all).

If I happen to recover from this fatigue quicker than expected, it may go faster. If I have a particularly inspired weekend, that may also move it along faster.

It’s kind of fun to explore where I might go next in this world. It feels very much like the times I’ve physically moved across the country myself to somewhere I’ve never been. Exciting and a bit terrifying. And that’s before I toss in some monsters and tragedies.

Very proud I got anything out at all this evening before I crashed completely for the night. I’m even prouder I didn’t push myself to do more than my energy levels and body warned was possible. That’s been so hard to learn! I’m so much better at it than I was a year ago.