You Don’t Need to do it all Just Because you Feel Well

I know what it’s like - you wake up one day and you don’t feel like… absolute shit? You feel like you actually have… a little bit of energy? 

What do you do next? I bet I can guess.

You decide to do it all. The laundry you’ve been putting off? The cleaning you haven’t had the energy to do? The coffee date you keep rescheduling? The work you’ve had to ignore for awhile? 

You start doing it ALL. 

And suddenly it’s the end of the day and you have a finished checklist, but instead of relief or pride or satisfaction, all you feel is exhaustion and pain as you choke back the tears of the reality that crashes into you - a better day doesn’t mean you’re back to normal.

That’s the thing about chronic illness - sometimes it gives us a small breather, a moment’s pause, to feel a little decrease in the sharpness of pain that follows us around each day, but what if instead of forcing yourself to use those small  pockets of relief for productivity, you simply let yourself revel in the joy of feeling better.

When you feel better, turn towards joy, not productivity.

When you feel better, you can still rest, but it’ll simply be rest that’s not riddled with pain.

When you feel better, you can just soak up the beauty of feeling better without feeling like you have to DO anything with that feeling-betterness. 

An amazing PTEA member shared advice her medical team gave her once - “when you have a better pain day, do 10 less things than you think  you ‘should’”

So brain dump everything your brain automatically tells you you “should” do with your feeling-betterness and then cross off at least 10 things.

We live in a society that tells us our worth is found in productivity, but you don’t have to live with that as the root of your belief system. You can simply be a human being, not a human doing.  

You can relax without guilt.

You can spend your good days just being.

You can push all of the “shoulds” out of your head.

This is your official permission slip, ok? Okay. <3