I'm so tired

Not right now. Actually, I am farily chipper, but I get so many people who are suffering from SZ and SZ like illnesses that I feel like I need to post something.

I used ot be so tired. No, not tired at all, exhausted. I didnt want to sleep, I wanted to be packed away in vaseline and left to sit still for a hundred years of rest. Emotions were too energy consuming. I slept, sure, but I never felt rested. I remember having to rest after flights of stairs, how my hands would shake after a simple run. how it took me days to recover form a strangth training session, no matter how mild. At my worst, I used to have to sit every few blocks. I could not cary a back pack very long and even a book or two in there felt like a lead weight.

There was lassitude.

lethargy: a state of comatose torpor (as found in sleeping sickness)
languor: a feeling of lack of interest or energy
inanition: weakness characterized by a lack of vitality or energy

There was the associated despondancy and depression.
This all made me feel terrible. I did not have the emotions to engage with people. I wasnted to be left alone. All the time I retracted from social interation. I stayed in. I said no. I could sit with my family, but not truly love them becuase interaction was so taxing. When they were gone I wept, or would have if I could have made the tears, becuase I was so alone. I wanted to reach out, to laugh and smile, but I could not.

Once, at my fathers house, I was so over come by enhuastion I lay on the ground in his living room, not moving. he came home and saw me there. He told me "get up". I said "I cant". I couldn't. I felt almost paralyzed. I think he thought I was lazy, not that day, but that summer. That day he was scared, becuase he could see I could not get up.

Even as I got well, I dreamed, fantasized about a house on a creek with books and sunshine where i never had to get up. I was scared if I stopped moving forward though, that I would never get well. So I put one foot infront of the other, all the way to law school ,and through it, and to graduation, and to a clerkship, and to work, and through a failed relationship. I just plodded along, adn looked to other people to know I should be having a good time, becuase I never felt it. I never felt anything.

Flat. I felt flat. Life went by and it was such a bother. This was the depressive side of the illness. I recall thinking of living another 60 years and I was terrified. I had no idea how I could make it. one day was so hard. I wanted to rest. To sleep. To wake up in a thousand years, fresh and ready to go. but I knew that rest was not the answer. it wasnt. I rested more and more and neve rimproved. I had to improve the energy systems.

There was a book by DOuglas adams, The Long Dark Tea Time of The SOul, in which the Norse gods are afflicted from a malaise. Odin sleeps eeveryday in a white linen bed, woken only once a day to have the bedding changed and fresh sheets brought in. That was my fantasy. Thats what it was like.