# Day 2: Waking Up

**Published by:** [KJ](https://paragraph.com/@kj-4/)
**Published on:** 2022-12-29
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@kj-4/day-2-waking-up

## Content

For the past couple weeks I’ve felt great—like my normal self. I had ideas, inspirations, extraversion…Lucid thoughts and the energy to take action. For most healthy people this stuff just sort of happens—you feel like calling a friend, so you do. You need to go grocery shopping, so you do that. You have an idea for a fun night out—and you make it happen. For me everything feels impossible. For the last two weeks I felt like I was wearing someone else’s body…Walking in a meat suit that miraculously functioned as it should. I reconnected with friends, had and pursued ideas, learned more programming than I had in the previous year…I thought maybe I’d made a lot of progress. Until yesterday I went to the gym…And realized it was all an illusion. As is typical I had no energy for a workout. So I went home after 20 mins of a light work, and new something was off. This morning I woke up at 3:30am…Sleep disturbances are one of the common symptoms that emerge from a flare up…But only in the most acute and severe flare ups. This worried me. I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep but then I woke up at 5am. Not good. I fell asleep once again and woke up at 7am. Finally I slept until 9am. When I rose the first thing I noticed was the tell tale soreness in my lower back. Another common symptom. Here we go. What causes this? I don’t know. I still don’t know. I have the energy reserves of a centenarian and the drive of a John Deere tractor. Eventually I overspend and my energy reserves start borrowing and eventually I break the bank and the end result is a litany of crippling symptoms that crescendo in psychological disturbances I don’t particularly like to share. The cascade of symptoms from physical, to neurological to psychological is predictable but always unexpected. Now, it’s 12pm. My vision is blurry. I see floaters and artifacts that had disappeared these last couple weeks. Staring at the computer screen it feels like I’m peering through a looking glass, but the glass is bent and amorphous. I can’t find the worst I’d like to use to write these very sentences. Creativity? It’s g0ne. How about survival. Can I make it through the day? Doubtful. I’ll likely need a nap. I’ll try to meditate. I’ll use NSDR. I’ll call a friend. I’ll do some pushups, but when I drop to the floor and the first 3 feel impossible I’ll have to give up. A note on pushups: I score in the elite level on all physical performance tests. I’m not an average human for whom doing 20 pushups is a challenging task. When I’m healthy I can do hundreds with ease. This is why I feel so dismayed. I’ve been given gifts—many of which I’ve forged myself from whole slabs of granite, with all the requisite sacrifices and pain…but I can’t claim the ROI. I have nothing to show for my efforts–and that has been the most consistent part of my life for a long time now. Just writing about it hurts. Writing about it it less-than-mediocre prose hurts more. I could try and edit this post but I don’t have the energy. I need to conserve it to do other things. To pray I don’t go bankrupt. To pray I can actually heal. To apologize to all the people I’ll let down for as long as this lasts. If this experience has given me anything it’s a deep and lasting compassion. When most of your life is easy, when you’re bestowed with gifts and privilege…losing everything is the only way to walk in someone else’s shoes. I no longer have to imagine what it’s like to be average—average IQ, average athletic ability, average height, average income, average beauty….I’ve felt it. And I’ve felt much worse. I used to despise average people. What could be worse than being a member of the masses–stuck in the middle of the bell curve…Now I have nothing. No gifts. No tools. No money. No prospects. No hope. Nothing. I feel completely destitute. At times this has felt freeing. Only when you’ve hit rock bottom do you have the clarity and perspective to rise. Maybe. People say that but I’m not sure. I thought I hit rock bottom at the end of 2018 and the first half of 2019. The searing pain, the repetitive illnesses. The fevers. The staph infections. The flus. The financial ruin. The absolutely positively crushing depression and anxiety. The total destruction of my heart and soul. Letting down friends. The shame of it all. It stings worse than you can imagine. But I endured.

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