Coming to a Head.

The tiredness and various pains came to a bit of a head (that’s a pun) last night. I was aware of a loud noise and wondered why I was lying on my office floor with a headache. There followed a few moments of confusion while I pieced together what must have happened.

The clock said 2.15, and I remembered that I’d been sitting at my computer at 1.45 deciding that I could fight the fatigue no longer and must go to bed. There was blood on my right cheek bone, the mouse was resting in the gap between the back of the desk and the wall, and my head was thumping. It was obvious that my body had got ahead of my brain: I’d fallen asleep, toppled off the computer chair and landed on the hard floor with nothing to break the fall. Fortunately, I have a tough head – it’s taken some serious blows down the years and I’m still here, no more than slightly mad. The one benefit to be enjoyed was that the backache had stopped, although it started again when I got up. I switched everything off and went to bed.

I woke up later than usual this morning, feeling moderately relaxed but exhausted. The backache started again when I got up, but it’s more of a dull ache than a sharp pain now. I’ve no idea where that suddenly sprang from.

I have the impression that I should be taking some sort of lesson from this. I’ve no doubt that it’s a fatigue problem stemming from ten years of stresses, occasionally coming singly but more often overlapping. I can even put my finger on where it started – May 2002 when I took a job I soon hated with a passion and pulled me down into some very dark moods. Since then it’s been one thing after another, coupled with increasing isolation and the attendant lack of support. That’s OK; isolation is an experience in itself and teaches lessons of its own. And I can’t really complain about lacking support, since I’ve spent most of my life declining it on the grounds that it was a sign of weakness. (I am wondering now, though, whether John Donne was right in what he said about men and islands – even if he meant something different by it.)

I gather that fatigue problems take years to come on and can take more years to get rid of. Diagnosis is a long process of eliminating other possible causes, and there’s no treatment anyway except rest. But how do you do that when you need adrenalin to function, and adrenalin is a two edged sword? Physical work was never the problem; the problem has always been engaging with life as a highly sensitive person. To a sort such as me, emotional rest would equate with stagnation, and stagnation produces its own stress. And the stupid thing is that stress can become a habit, something you almost have to have, something you find in the slightest of causes.

So is anything going to change? Having committed this latest little episode to my old friend Blogger, I think it probably won’t. Right now I want to go and recline on the sofa in my living room, but my neighbour has gone out, the dogs are barking as usual, the noise is loudest in the living room, and it gets on my nerves. See what I mean?