Challenges and lessons learned

(Nimue)

It’s been a startlingly tough few weeks. There have been a number of challenges – these things never seem to turn up at decent intervals. Between the stress, the anxiety, the workload, and a bout of being bodily very ill, I crashed badly. This led to migraine territory. I’ve had largely visual migraines on and off for years and usually I can just muddle through it. This one knocked out my ability to focus my gaze on anything near me. For several days I could not read on screens for more than a few minutes at a time. I couldn’t read books, or even ingredients lists on food packaging.

I’ve spent a lot of time lying down with my eyes shut trying to get on top of this. It’s been intimidating. Without being able to read, I can’t do any of the things I normally do of a workish nature. I can’t do many of the things I do for leisure either. Spinning seems to help with soothing my brain, so that’s been something.

I’m used to being able to push through. Often I depend on the fact that my willpower is significant and I can push my body when I need to. Hitting such a hard no from my body has been disconcerting. I clearly need to be much gentler with myself in face of both psychological stress and bodily illness. I thought I’d been doing better around resting but this week indicates that I’m still not doing what I need to do.

I tend to get visual migraines in response to overload – not enough sleep, not enough nutrients, dehydration, stress, too much light and noise. My vision fills up with weird extras. Yesterday it looked like a squirrel for a while. I get flocks of birds, shoals of fish. The first time it happened I got a large and brightly coloured sea horse. At least the shapes my brain makes when distressed are of themselves endearing and distinct enough that most of the time I can identify them as not real. I did once spend a weekend with a huge swarm of tiny insects, and that took me a little while to figure out because it was more plausible.

I’m behind on everything. If I get a couple of good days I can fix that, but I know I can’t push for it.  Currently I’m writing this by taking breaks regularly and closing my eyes. Today the visual interference looks like someone is writing me messages in Japanese.

I’m sharing this partly for accountability, and partly because I think it’s important to talk about limits. Our mammal bodies can only take so much, and if you keep pushing, eventually you push yourself over a cliff and then there are far fewer options. Hopefully I’ve not done myself more damage than I can recover from, but this week has shown me that this is a possibility and not something to be complacent about.