Excited about getting better

I’m feeling quite excited about the prospect of getting better. Woke up quite early this morning, excited about all the things I want to do when I recover. I could feel my heart racing and the adrenaline pumping as I thought about it all… which really isn’t what I want right now!

I do feel reasonably OK today though. I watched Session 9 on Dealing With Dips. A lot of the material is very relevant to me; I have always been very driven and success-oriented. Exactly the personality type that Ashok describes as being susceptible to the stress-response that causes Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It’s only a wonder it didn’t hit me earlier.

Even though I’m aware that I do it, I still tend to look to other people for approval, and to external achievements to make me feel good about myself. I’m working on changing that, and it’s fascinating to see the same message coming at me from lots of different directions, including now the retraining programme.

Naturally enough when I think about all the things I want to do when I get better, I want to do them all now, now, NOW! Even if I were 100% immediately, I’d still be feeling that I wanted to get everything accomplished and completed right now today, so I can have all the successful results tomorrow; which isn’t how life works. Hence the need to pace myself and accept that I’m where I’m at today, and there will be plenty of time to do what I want tomorrow. It doesn’t have to all happen in an instant. Even if it did, that instant would immediately be gone; and then I’d just find something else I wanted to do!

I’ve been busily breaking thoughts about my fear over a future career path. If I can get to being more accepting of going -with-the-flow, I think I’ll be a lot less stressed. It all seemed clearer when I was doing Computer Engineering, but I know I don’t want to go back to that. The purpose of a career is to learn about something; in fact, the purpose of life is to learn about stuff I think. I already know enough about computers, and I want to learn more about people, how they tick, and how to be a master at interacting with them. Although I didn’t see it at the time, having a mainstream career was really quite grounding… up until the point when I stopped enjoying it, and it became a burden. Then I moved on, but I do miss the certainty that comes with a mainstream job and career.

I’ve been learning to play Good Riddance by Green Day on my guitar. It pretty much sums up my feelings about CFS. I’ll get myself a video camera and upload a shoot of me playing it onto YouTube for you once I’m feeling a bit more confident about it. I’ll try not to stress out or wait until I can play it perfectly though. Near enough is good enough, especially if it prevents an adrenaline cycle!