It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on how I’m travelling and to be honest it’s been a bit of a bumpy past 6 weeks with my ME/CFS. I guess it should to be expected though, you should never under estimate the power of your chronic illness (especially when you don’t listen to your body). So here’s an update on my happenings.

I had been increasing my hours at work and I managed to get up to working 8 hours over 2 days a week. Excitement overload! I was working 4 hours a day, that’s half a day!

Being able to work again felt great, but working only 8 hours was starting to not be good enough. In my mind I wanted to be able to work more. My mind was racing well ahead to what I wanted to be doing, rather than what I should be doing. All I wanted to do was keep pushing and eventually I would be at my current goal of working 15 hours a week. In theory it sounded easy enough. I wanted to keep pushing myself to my limit and that meant that I wasn’t taking notice of the fact that I was going to push a little too hard and crash.

Well that happened, straight after I realised maybe I should just calm it down a bit. After pushing through a day at work, I struggled to recover back from it. I thought I would need one week off to rest, but that turned into five!

All I can say is lesson is learnt! It’s all well and good to push yourself, but sometimes you need to take a step back and listen to what your body is trying to tell you.

After 5 weeks off with lots of rest and time to reflect here’s what I learnt;

Patience. You will get to where you want to be eventually, it just takes time.

Stop comparing yourself to others. Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

Be kind to yourself. We are our biggest critic of ourselves, how about giving yourself a kind compliment instead of beating yourself up all the time.

Listen to your body. Yes it does communicate with you, make sure you listen to it!

Don’t give up. No matter how much this situation may feel like it is dragging on, it won’t last forever so keep trying, you will get there!

On that note I went back to work last week and managed a couple of hours, it felt great to be back at it again. I’m back at the start but that’s ok, I know I will get to where I want to be eventually. It might not be today or tomorrow but it will happen.

Much love,

Lennae xxx