A Lucid Moment

The enshittification of Facebook is continuing apace. I and a lot of my friends are settling into Bluesky (I'm gealbhan@bsky.social) and really the only things that make me reluctant to kill my entire account like I did Twitter is the large number of friends still on there and the fact that it amounts to 15 years worth of diary.

So I'm picking this account up again. The last entry was me trying to work out why my health was so poor and wondering what my capacity in the future might be. Turns out that I'm type 2 diabetic and so I was spending a lot of time being near hyperglycemic. I've also realised that while the acute symptoms of the haemolytic anaemia I had years ago were resolved, I've never been the same since. So I'm now wildly obese and the executive dysfunction has cranked up to potato. With the wonderful help of some very good friends, I cleared the squalid tip that was my home and rearranged my living space. That was well over three months ago and I seem to have formed some good habits although I do need to form some more.

My life has contracted. My capacity for everything has reduced. My 40s were the period of spectacular physical decline that I feared it might be and my 50s look like being the consolidation of that. This looks like the time to change what I can, and live with what I can't. I need to make my peace with that but I also need to be better at working out what I can and cannot actually change. A work in progress.

It's nearly 3am and I cannot sleep. I have a meeting at work tomorrow where I will be advised that I no longer have a job due to "breach of policies", that is, I'm working too slowly. Tomorrow will be the first time I have gone to work this week and I will be going in purely for that meeting. At that point, I will no longer have a job and subsequently, an income.

This is not a surprise. On Monday, being driven to the shops and buying some groceries was enough to reduce me to a panting, sweaty, aching wreck. Today, making dinner did something similar. I can't work. Hell, I can't even look after myself. I had to rely on a friend to buy cat food for me the other day so that the fluffbrat didn't go hungry. So not a surprise. But this is where the wheels really fall off my life. I lose the ability to retain my home by dint of my own efforts. Doing the simplest things HURTS and renders me incapable of doing another of the simplest things. So I can't lay down and close my eyes without thinking of tomorrow, and then I cry. Crying is another of those simple things which can be exhausting, so I should avoid that. So I make ugly terrified keening noises while tears run disconcertingly into my ears and my cat flees to the relative peace of the loungeroom. This is no fun so I've made a pot of tea and am just going to try to draw breath.

I am so over this. I am over being sad and angry and frightened and sore and exhausted. I think I'm into the bargaining stage which is awkward because there is nobody to whom I can beg to make things better. So I'm back to anger. It's a really good thing that I'm still way more interested in being me than being nothing because dark thoughts can be awfully dark. I just found a whole other set of ways in which a lot of things in the world that people take for granted are not for me anymore. I wonder just how circumscribed my existence is going to be. I wonder just how long my friendships can remain active in the face of me not being able to do much to maintain them. So I see my life shrinking in scope and the days running into each other until disability trickles into old age and I gently and oh so blandly and tediously wink out. This was not the life script I had in mind and I mourn the self who I had hoped to spend the remainder of my life with. I need this to not be my reality, please.

The last three weeks at work have been an exercise in futility. I actually made it all the way through last week but that was because I don't work Fridays now and Thursday was a public holiday. So I managed three days. When I say I managed three days, I mean I stumbled home on Wednesday and immediately fell into bed. I was completely written off for the next day and a half and was still sketchy enough that I was super flat for the rest of the weekend. This week I was flat on Monday, staggered home on Tuesday literally shaking with fatigue and lasted about 45 minutes today before coming home and going to bed for seven hours. I've just gotten up and I ache all over and thinking is something which happens slowly and with effort. I'm clearly trying to function well beyond my capacity at the moment and it's a bit disastrous. There's no way I can manage to go to work tomorrow. I'd probably get there and last maybe an hour as an exercise in showing willing.

On Mondays, the first half of the day is usually fine. I start to feel nasty sometime after lunch. Tuesdays are inevitably worse, probably because I pushed on Monday. So hopefully two half days per week, ideally not consecutively, would work. I really hope I don't look back on this entry and sigh wistfully but I know it's a possibility. I think I've got to the point where this body has no redeeming features though. There is basically nothing I like about it at all.