Good, Better, Rest.

This Tuesday night just gone was meant to be another performance of Rainbow Religion. Instead, sickness got in the way. And the whole process of that got me ruminating a bit (not literally, I’m not a cow now), so I wanted to write down some of my thoughts. Much of this is probably rehashing things I’ve said before at some point, but I’ve written a lot. It’s hard to remember what exactly I’ve put down and when.

I’ve been kinda sick for the past few weeks. The first week, it started with a bad sore throat. Like, hurts to swallow level, hurts to drink water and such. That was shit. Then, week two, my tongue decided to get some sores on it. That felt weird to me, so I went into the GP, got some tests done. End of that week, they said, “Hey, this might be glandular fever. We’re just going to run another test.” (There’s not really any treatment as such for it; just rest, drink a lot of water, don’t do heavy lifting. This was right before a weekend where I was moving, too!) They come back to me start of last week, and yep, it is. By that time, though, tongue is mostly better, can’t see much visibly, just hurts a bit. But that didn’t really change for all of last week. Then Monday this week, day before my performance, my voice is gravel and my throat is not great. I try and do all the things to get it better - but woke up Tuesday morning, still bad. Could I have still done the performance? In a pinch, probably. But my body would have given me even more shit than it already was.

Because I had been needing to rest, and I hadn’t been resting enough. I hadn’t been allowing myself the chance to heal, recuperate. At the same time, though, it’s not like I was doing that much? I don’t do sport or anything, and I don’t work full time. But I enjoy doing things too much. There are always too many things I want to do. Even just in the last week, I’ve had two big new project ideas. My brain just keeps coming up with more. Yay, ADHD! So that’s one part of why rest is hard.

But the other part is the society that we’ve built. Rest really hasn’t been built into it. We’ve been getting better, slowly - but particularly for neurodivergent people, and for disabled people, it’s still such a struggle. I work about three and a bit days a week most weeks, and that’s an intentional choice, because I know I don’t have the energy to be working full time. But even at this level - I’m burning out, and crashing, and needing a lot more rest then I’m already giving myself. But we have to work to live. And I’m not “disabled enough” for the Disability Support Pension. And the regular Jobseeker payments are - not good. Both in a monetary sense, and in so many others.

I need to rest. And I need to rest better, and more. And I need to find work that doesn’t burn me out as much. (I’ve been looking to various degrees for about six months or so now, finding work is hard.) And I don’t know the answer. I just hope I figure things out before I break too badly.