I realise that sounds like stating the obvious; honestly, I do, but there's something more to it than just saying being ill means being ill.
Over the past sixteen ish months I've learnt a lot about myself and some of it is stuff I was having to re-learn about living with anxiety and low moods, and some of it was learning about the issues I've had for a long time that were attributed to other things, like laziness.
I took a period of time off work because I was not well, and it took me a while to feel better, and whilst I am feeling better in general these days, I am not back to "normal", I don't know when I will be and actually I don't know if I ever will be, because the normal that I was then might not be the normal that I get to when I feel normal again.
In the midst of all of this, I'm realising that recovery isn't this perfect upswing; it's a bunch of tiny steps and back slides and then deciding to keep going and keep trying. Most of those back slides are going to be unintentional, because the brain is a weird little place and sometimes we feel worse than we did the day before just because. Those are the days that are the most difficult and on those days it is really difficult to fall into good habits which mean we make those little back slides in a recovery journey.
For me a big part of a good day is being able to focus on things, but I have a bad habit of hyper-focusing on things and it makes me forget to do other things, so I can end up forgetting to go and make myself food until I'm too hungry to think about it and I just want something I can eat in the moment, which means I eat a lot of ready in minutes things, which aren't exactly healthy, and I sometimes forget whether I bought bananas or not. (I also know that bananas aren't the answer to everything but they're pretty good.)
Thing is, when I forget to eat until I get like that, I end up eating late, which means I sleep late, because that's always been a thing. If I eat just before bed I won't settle, partly because my stomach won't settle and partly because it wakes me up.
As soon as I don't sleep, whether because I've leant into the fact I was tired and haven't really moved much during the day, whether it's because I have eaten late, or whether it's because I just don't feel safe a lot of the time and that doesn't make it easy to sleep, it causes me to have other issues. I don't really know what causes me to feel like I'm not safe, but it's how I am, and it means that I'm going to lend the problems of one day over to the next day, because lack of sleep gives me headaches, makes me grouchy, makes me feel like I'm having a low mood and also makes me inclined to feel quite nauseated which doesn't help convince me to eat properly the next day.
As long as it's something you recognise and do your best to stop, as much as is humanly possible at the time, recovery is still possible. Sometimes that will be a monumental effort and other times it will be easier, but on bad days it's going to be the hardest thing you've ever tried to do, and what is worth remembering that the good days can outweigh the bad if you let them.
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