One of the stranger things about having been, essentially, continuously sick since the start of February is that I feel as if I feel as if I haven’t really managed to have any downtime, despite the fact that… well, basically the entire time I haven’t been working across the past eight or nine weeks has been downtime in a technical sense. I mean, what else would you call lying in bed, or on a couch, feeling dizzy and unable to do anything that requires focus and attention for more than a few minutes?
Of course, it’s downtime of one kind, but only one. The ability to do any of the many other things that, honestly, I very much would have liked to have managed by this point of the year — a list that includes anything from “doing my taxes” to “going for more walks,” or even simply “watching all of the movies I have on my ‘to watch’ list” — has been absent, and by this point of the calendar, I can feel the pressure of all those ambitions, from small to necessarily larger, weighing on me. It’s gone from, “man, it’s be nice to do something else” to “I really need to do those other things, before it’s too late.” And yet.
The entire experience is, in its own way, an unexpectedly renewing one. I feel appreciative of the small joys of time off (especially when it isn’t, you know, actually free time because tasks and other demands are looming) in a way I wasn’t months ago — mostly because, you know, I miss it — and I feel as if the trial-and-error of “maybe I can do this without feeling bad, oops” has also taught me the value of actually listening to my body and taking a break in a way I probably should have mastered decades earlier. Assuming that there is, at some point, an end to this phlegm-filled project I accidentally and unintentionally signed up for, I might end up looking back on it somewhat fondly in the future as a necessary reminder of my own limits that I’d been ignoring for too long.
Or maybe that’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking.