I finished a book today: The Fatigue Artist by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. It wasn't a great book, but it was a good one. The kind that inspired me to write because it was accessible (funny, personal, only a bit more erudite than I am) but was also a bit too pedestrian to inspire me very far (with a little discipline, I say to myself, I could've written it -- and therefore must not be great, right?). And even more importantly, the content was interesting. The narrator as writer, aware of her own story. The fatigue syndrome running throughout as subject, as metaphor, as common theme -- and yet somehow it doesn't become one of those "overcoming illness" books. It also happened to be one of the most convincing, accurate portrayals of what chronic fatigue is really like; and now that I think about it, maybe one of the first I've read. The love affair with the bed, the limbs that feel like sand, the desperation that leads to alternative medicine (we called it "voodoo" in my house; she calls her doctor a "witch" in this book). And even more interestingly, the meditations on love and relationships, and the nature of different loves and relationships. It really was quite complex. And the protagonist was likable. The only problem is I never, for one second, forgot I was reading a book. Although I suppose that was the point. I just prefer to get lost in a novel, to be taken somewhere else.
In any case, it was an interesting choice this weekend, when I feel so overcome with fatigue myself. Sometimes I wonder if I've never kicked my teenage mono/chronic fatigue/narcolepsy/whatever at all, but have just gotten used to it. When these bouts come — these days I could stay in my bed morning til night, and then some (though I usually get a second wind in the evening, as now, and want to stay up all night long), reading and watching movies and dozing off every so often — I wonder if they're the natural product of overwork and overstress, or if my illness lays dormant until needed, or if I really do just have a weak consitution. My Ashkenazi blood. A Victorian frailty.
One year at Burning Man, an old boyfriend found me at just the point in the week when I was succumbing to serious dehydration — the kind of dehydration that later led to puking and IVs. My new boyfriend was taking care of me. The old boyfriend, who'd been with me almost the whole way through college, gave him a bit of advice: "Take care of her. She's delicate." It seemed both knowing and caring, the kind of thing that gave me a shot of nostalgia to hear it. But it also made me wonder, am I fragile? Is it natural in me? Is it somehow my fault?
I resist the idea, in some ways. I don't like to think that I'm weaker than other people. Then again, if I'm naturally delicate, that means I don't have to go on any more searches for "the cure." There is no cure. I simply need to be gentle with myself, the way you are with antique tea cups and small babies. It's a wonderful luxury, to give in to giving myself just what I need, just when I need it.
I wonder if I'll ever get there, if I'll ever let myself do just what I need just when I need it.
I wonder what's standing in my way?
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