Fatigue is not tiredness.
It is hard to imagine how weak or fatigued you are with this illness. I’m sorry if you can imagine as it means you must be a fellow sufferer. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
Sleep does not improve our condition. In fact the mornings can be the worst for me. We never wake up feeling refreshed or rested as human beings should. We are often hit by night after night of insomnia. Staying up all night is not nearly as fun as I remember it being at university!!! We are not lazy louts who lounge around all day watching television. We are often too poorly to watch tv. It requires energy that we do not have. It is simply too much for our brains to process. With me, my vision is still affected by my M.E. and so this makes it difficult to read a book or magazine. If my vision was to behave, my concentration levels are not always up to the challenge anyway because of the overwhelming fatigue.
To cut a long story short, our bodies are not able to produce energy like they once did. Our batteries are flat and nobody knows how to recharge them, other than to rest but even that only charges us to a fraction of what we’d hope for.
Just tired? We wish!
To be too fatigued to speak sounds ridiculous I know. However, the muscles needed to do so are sometimes too weak. The energy required to get these muscles going is no longer there.
Next time you send a text message think about what you are doing. Your fingers have to be strong enough to press the keys even on a touch screen phone. Your brain must function correctly so that you can form proper sentences and remember the conversation that you are engaged in. The effort it takes to move your arm and head and neck to pick up the phone…
The same applies when you make a cup of tea. You must first lift the kettle. Run the tap. Fill the kettle. It is now even heavier than it was before. You reach up to open the cupboard. Get out a mug. Put it on the work surface. Get out a tea bag. Get a spoon from the drawer. Walk across the room to the fridge. Pull the fridge door open. Bend to get the milk. Close the fridge door. Walk back to the kettle. You must also remember that the kettle is hot and you should not touch it. With a condition such as mine you have forgotten these apparently unforgettable ways of life like needing to wear oven gloves when removing something from the oven…your brain ceases to function as it should.
So no, we M.E. sufferers are not ‘just tired.’
M.E. myself and I 
You capture a day in the life of an M.E sufferer so well here, Anna. It is really hard to explain how we feel to people who have no idea and usually think, “Well, I get tired too” as though it's no big deal. Whereas, it's a seriously incapacitating illness with a wide spectrum of debilitating symptoms.
I do hope and pray you will recover some strength and energy soon and find life less of a struggle. Blessings 🙂 xx
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