It is officially spring. At least it is when I’m writing this. Who knows when you’re reading this (but chances are good that it is also spring, given how infrequently old posts of mine resurface). It is the first of Spring today and the weather has stopped its mad fluctuations for at least a little bit. Next week holds the promise of some wild swings between freezing weather and the seventies, so who know what kind of day you’ll be reading this on, but the days before it will be proper, early-Spring days and most of the days after it will be proper early-spring days, so I’m looking forward to having at least a little stability in the weather for a while. After all, things have been jumping up and down (in both temperature and air pressure), that I’ve been decidedly under the weather for a while now. It’s usually not that bad, unless it’s jumping forty degrees in a single day, but I’ve been in a rough place for a while now, due to burnout and exhaustion, so even a little bit takes a toll on me. Still, thanks to feeling buoyed by sunlight, how late sunset is these days, and generally uplifted by the warm weather, I managed to push through it. Then I got a stomach bug, got laid out for two days dealing with that, and then everything came crashing down on me, keeping me laid out for another three days. It was rough, but I’m coming out the other side of it feeling better than I have in a while.

Turns out that, when you’re collapsing from exhaustion every night, taking a few days to be still, rest, and not do much is actually really good for you. It kinda sucks to be so sick that you can’t do much else and have to stockpile water bottles when you go upstairs to your office, couch, and TV so you still have plenty of water if you’re not up for navigating the stairs every couple of hours, but at least it made me actually take it easy rather than start cleaning my apartment or figuring out what chores I could be doing to get ahead of some thing or another once I was finished with my working from home for the day. I was not, of course, sick enough to take time off work and was prepared to drag my exhausted behind into work for my project’s final release meeting if it wound up being schedule on one of the days I was sick, but I didn’t have to do that and got to take it relatively easy while working from my couch or my very comfortable desk chair at home. Even if there was still work to do and things I had to actually spend my incredibly limited energy on, it was still a lot less demanding than most of my normal days in the office. So now I’ll be going into the week this blog post will go up feeling a bit more rested than I normally would have [this was rather naïve of me to think, if I’m being honest, since I clearly wasn’t getting proper “rest” that would restore me to above my usual capacity when I was in the process of recovering from being sick].

So I spent the last few days of winter and the first couple days of spring sick, laid out, and generally just resting as much as I could. It’s not the most fun way to start the season, but I’ve started spring in worse shape than this. It’d be nice to actually feel refreshed going into next week, to be able to enjoy all the better weather this season has to offer while it’s still available (before whatever weird weather we’re going to have arrives as climate change takes its toll), but I’ll take just not feeling as sick and awful as I do right now [which I thankfully did get]. I don’t like that I pushed myself to the point that stopping to rest even a little bit has completely knocked me on my ass, but I’m not really sure what else I could have done that wouldn’t have involved a higher-priority thing going undone. That’s always the problem: I’ve got a lot of higher priorities than my own health and well-being right now. Normally I like to schedule some breaks in, but I really didn’t have much of a chance to do that through the first three months of the year, so it’s not terribly surprising that it would all catch up with me at some point, especially considering what rough shape I was still in at the start of the year, coming off that last medication I was on…

Now, though, it is Spring, I am trying to rest, and I’ve got a vacation coming up that will hopefully give me the rest I need to get my shit back together somehow. It will be a full, proper rest with very little planned, nothing scheduled, and as much rest as I can muster by sleeping as long as I can make myself stay in bed. Assuming, of course, that I’m not dealing with some wild weather and need to turn my AC on during this vacation. It doesn’t do a great job of getting to my bedroom, so I’d probably move out of my bed more quickly than I might otherwise. Regardless, I hope I can fix my sleep schedule by not staying up stupidly late and waking up also stupidly late, but I’m really not sure anything with fix that horrendous mess except a couple weeks off with me trying to stay up later and later every night so that I can essentially wrap my sleep schedule around through the day and back to the evening again. I used to do that all the time in high school, college, and even in my early 20s, but now it is a particularly daunting task because, no matter what I’ve been doing or how late I woke up, I always get tired by three in the morning now. I wish that I would get tired and want to go to sleep at, like, eleven or twelve at night so I could fix my sleep schedule more easily, but that is apparently not my lot in life these days. For now, though, I’m just going to enjoy the fresh air streaming in through my open windows and continue trying to rest my way out of being sick.