On Being 55 (or probably any age, really...)

When I look at other people who are 55, I'm struck by just how much older than me they look.

Until I glance in the mirror...

A State of Mind

When I'm not drowning in deep depression,
or wrestling with high anxiety,
or bone-achingly weary with mental exhaustion,
or overwhelmed with existential angst, unable to stop staring into an eternal pit of of the darkest nihilism,
then I find I'm actually quite optimistic...

Time and Energy

And then the programme crashed, just as I was putting the finishing touches to a project that I'd been working on for 3 hours, but because of the CFS had effectively taken me 2 days of scraping together bits here and bits there.

I didn't have the time or energy to do it again.

Other things had far more priority and I probably shouldn't have been wasting my precious resources on it anyway.

It wasn't an important thing, just a bit of trivial fun.

But still I wept.

I'm not OK about not feeling OK

Stop telling me that it's OK not to feel OK!

The whole thing about not feeling OK is that I'm not OK with it!

I get what you're trying to say is that under the current circumstances it's perfectly natural to not feel OK, and there's no need to add extra guilt, or beat myself up about not being OK.

But I'm still not OK with not being OK!

Not being OK feels like a crock of shit, and I don't like it – it's not OK!

I want to stop feeling I'm not OK.

And you telling me it's OK not to feel OK isn't making me feel any better.

It might be making YOU feel better to tell me it's OK not to feel OK, because it helps distract you from not feeling OK.

But it's only making me feel even more useless that I can't be OK with not feeling OK.

I just want to stop feeling not OK.