“It’s normally around this time of year you get sick. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet already.”
As much as I wanted to disagree with the observation, I had to agree that I was actually feeling a little bit under the weather. It was a realization I had probably subconsciously made a couple of days earlier, but searched for multiple get out clauses from. I’d been feeling not-quite-right for a few days, but tried to explain it away with any number of potential explanations that didn’t really hold any water: I’d slept poorly the night before or I’d been paying too much attention to one particular thing at work and couldn’t quite concentrate on anything else as a result or whatever. I knew the truth, but I simply didn’t want to actually admit that’s what was actually happening.
I was denying it in part because, bluntly, I do always tend to get sick at this time of the year and I’m bored with that tradition. It’s not that I get sick sick as much as I get very run down because work always gets crazy in December — it’s the most wonderful time of the year to try and get everything off your plate before the holidays, after all — and the weather here in Portland likes to yo-yo in terms of temperature and wetness, which creates the perfect conditions for a headcold, at least in my case. It’s something that I can try to avoid, but it catches up with me nonetheless. Take this year, for example.
Denying it, however, doesn’t do any good; I just end up feeling worse, because I don’t do anything to feel better and so I just exhaust myself further. That’s what happened this year, until I had to finally ‘fess up to myself and admit that, all things considered, I needed to just lie on the couch for awhile and watch some shitty television and try to switch my brain off. Which, in my defense, is what I try to do with my time off anyway. It’s just that, this time, I can pretend that I’m doing it for medicinal purposes. Perhaps there’s one good thing about getting sick, after all.