I’ve been falling apart lately. In mid-April, I started to feel an incredible amount of physical pain. This coincided with packing up the entire house and moving, so it seemed about right. Although much of the pain I was feeling wasn’t really the type that comes with over exerting muscles, it was sharper than that and seemed to live more in my joints. I have no doubt that it was largely caused by stress rather than moving. Although moving was certainly a part of it given my current out-of-shapeness!
In the last month, the itchiness has started. It began on my lower legs and now it’s random all over. There is no rash or spots associated with it, just itchiness. I did what everyone does these days, I looked it up on the internet. The usual cause is dry skin. Now I know that I can have dry skin and I know what that’s usually like on me, so I didn’t think this was the cause. However, I have been laying off the lotion lately because it’s humid out, so I thought that perhaps it could be just that. I practically bathed in lotion and it didn’t really make a difference except that if my hands start itching, it does seem to help it stop. But I think that’s just all in my head, which brings me to another reason for non-rash-itchiness (according to the internet), that’s mental health concerns. I reached out to my therapist, who is now long-distance, and a phone session with her seemed to help for a few hours. Given that I know from my history that I can cause pain in my body due to stress, I figured it wasn’t that much of a stretch that my brain was causing an itchy sensation.
I think of myself as a cautious person. I don’t like to put myself into too many situations that might affect my physical health and well-being, yet every single person on the planet is in exactly that constant situation right now. My therapist thought that it might be possible that this nagging, itching, irritating thought of a global pandemic could be resulting in an actual physical itch. I thought she might be right. Or I hope that she it because there is another cause online for non-rash itchiness. Those would be liver disease, kidney disease, hypothyroidism, and cancer (along with a couple of others I’ve forgotten). Needless to say this list is not helping my mental state.
Here’s where I’m a little worried about that last list. I’ve actually been pretty happy lately. I mean, content-ish. For me, this is huge. I find myself motivated. I like my job. I’ve been spending more time with my husband since April than we have in our entire 2+ decades together because he isn’t travelling now like he usually does. We’re not even arguing (after that first week or two), at least not the way we used to. I’m even incredibly lucky right now to NOT personally know anyone who is sick with this dang virus (although a couple of family members have had to get tested due to exposure, they were negative!). So if I’m not stressed about my normal things like a crappy job or an unhappy marriage, then what would be causing the itching?
I thought about our house hunting process. It certainly is frustrating because of the very limited selection of anything decent on the market and the huge bidding war that’s been taking place on anything that is actually good. I love houses, and I want to find the perfect house because we don’t want to uproot ourselves and move again for a long time. I’m very worried that I’ll have to compromise and end up in something that I’ll just not feel is quite right. That is certainly, without a doubt, a massive amount of stress I’ve put on myself. I just couldn’t think though, that it’s been causing me so much stress that I’ve started to itch.
I haven’t been able to do some of the things that sometimes help, like regular massages or a facial. I had to cancel my gym membership when we moved and haven’t joined another, but since it is summer, I’ve been able to go outside for walks or bike rides, and I think that’s better anyway. But it would be nice to go swimming for a full body muscle workout. This virus thing has put a cramp on that for me. In my area, people are going to the gym and are maintaining a somewhat “normal” routine, but I think that limiting interactions is still the healthier and more responsible option. I have to interact with people for my job and I still have to run errands like groceries. I figure that by the time I’ve done what I have to do, I’ve used up my invisible allotment of human interactions and therefore can’t do what I’d maybe like to do.
There’s certainly stress in all of that, but it just hasn’t felt like I actually identified what’s bothering me at the core. This is, of course, assuming that I don’t actually have any of those serious diseases mentioned above.
Then yesterday something happened. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep. So I watched some tv for a bit, grabbed a snack and was able to fall back asleep. I was in the middle of a dream when my husband woke me up to tell me he was going to the gym. Note that I said I was in the middle of a dream – as in deep sleep. Waking me up at that time means I’m crabby and feel worn out but when I get woken up, I can’t fall back asleep. So I got up, had some toast, watched a little tv and felt like I simultaneously couldn’t sleep or wake up. I went back to bed and tried to sleep for a little bit at which time my husband came home and woke me back up again, although I wasn’t really asleep this time, just dozing a bit. I complained and he wandered off and I proceeded to lightly sleep until well past noon. Then I took a little cat nap about two hours later, only for about 15 minutes, but I was so tired that I needed that cat nap to keep me going for the rest of day. After all that, I was still completely wiped out by 9pm and hit the pillow where I fell asleep fairly easily. I did wake up twice in the middle of the night, the second time was at 4am when I was pretty wide awake but was able to fall back asleep probably within 10-15 minutes and stayed that way til the alarm woke me up a couple of hours later. And when it did, it woke me up as opposed to me starting to wake up a little before the beeping, so I knew that I was really asleep.
As I proceeded to hit snooze over and over for a good 40 minutes, something hit me. I was wishing I could sleep til noon again and realized that I was pretty tired and could easily do it if I didn’t have to get up and go to work. Then it hit me. I’m exhausted.
I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.
This is leading to physical achiness and pain and itchiness. I think this is the reason because when I came to that conclusion this morning, I felt a little like I was putting some pieces of me back together. I felt a little more whole and a little more complete and a little more relaxed and I did not experience as much pain when I got out of bed. I felt like I could move a little more freely and I didn’t experience any itching until about mid-day when my co-worker and I discussed the current state of the pandemic/virus.
I’m exhausted. Like so many people worldwide. Only I didn’t know it.
It takes quite a bit for me to realize something. As I was lying in bed thinking about this earlier today, I remembered that I’ve been starting to tell people how busy I feel. I feel that my to-do list is as full now as it was a year ago. I’ve been feeling a little bit like I wished I could go back into the house and not go anywhere for a while again. Those couple of months stuck in the house were largely good for me (I did get a little bit of isolation fatigue). When I realized that it was about 4-6 weeks ago when I realized I was busy and about 3-4 weeks ago when I started to tell others that I was feeling as busy as ever then it hit me that I’m just plain tired!
This is all combined with the fact that for about two weeks I’ve been really cranky and emotional. More than usual. It seemed that I felt like crying a lot but am not able to actually do just that. I just wanted to sit on the couch in a nest of blankets and pillows. All of these things are signs of depression for me and I assumed that I had fallen into old habits without knowing I was falling. But it was in contradiction with the general feeling that things were doing ok for me for once.
It just hit me that I’ve been mentally pushing for a while now. I want to keep up on posts on my site (I’m failing), I started writing a book last fall (pre-pandemic) that’s been largely on pause for months and I want to get back to it, I’ve been slowly going through my entire (ENTIRE!) wardrobe which is emotional as well as physical, I’ve been trying to lose weight and watch what I eat and log calories, there’s the never ending house cleaning, there always seems to be paperwork stacked on the table, I feel like I’m always having to go to the grocery store, and then I need to make more masks because I seem to have to wear one every day and that’s ongoing laundry and I don’t even have pets or kids or social events I’m obligated to go to!! And on top of this, I really and truly love that I’m around my husband so much more, but I’m not used to it. For two decades I’ve basically had half of the week alone and that has all changed, I now have to share the house nearly full time! I’m exhausted! I got a taste of what it would be like to just chill and work at a leisurely pace and plan some meals and go for 10 am walks and still be able to keep the house up and it…was…nice!
Apparently I don’t handle regular life crap very well. Which adds more stress because how can I ever become President if I can’t even handle a grocery list?! (The President has someone do to that of course!)
I’m hopeful that this is truly the issue because then I can identify it and take steps to alleviate it. I really did feel like I hit on what was going on this morning and I’m going to just try to work within that this week and see if that is it. It might mean not getting a damn thing done all week except try to finish this post – which is largely therapeutic for me – because I may just have to sit on my butt and not care about anything for a few days.
I can’t change the world when I’m exhausted. I have no plans to give up, but I think it’s time to focus on finding new ways that allow me to rest and recharge so I can move forward.
