Having a go in the real world

There are 168 hours in a week.

On average I spend all 168 hours at home because I am too poorly not to.
(I am also too poorly to have visitors. Having visitors and leaving the house are pretty much the same. In fact I prefer to go out to socialise so that I can leave, to go home, when I need to. If I have visitors and suddenly feel that I need to rest or feel too ill to carry on chatting, I would feel so rude asking my visitors to leave.)

This week was different. It’s a one off. It was birthday week. I wanted to have a taste of normal life. This last week I spent 3.5 hours out of the house on Saturday having lunch with a best friend in a quiet restaurant. On Sunday I spent 3.5 hours out of the house having a quiet evening in at another best friend’s house. Then on Tuesday I was out of the house for an hour visiting friends. That’s 8 hours out of the house out of a total of 168. Only 8 hours of doing more activity than just meeting my baseline targets.
(Of course there is my virtual tea party to take into account too, but I was careful to have purple time and breaks instead of sitting on my laptop all of the time.)

For those wonderful 8 hours I am paying the price. I am in bed. I am not well enough to shower or even brush my own teeth. I can only tolerate the TV in short bursts. Using my laptop is making me ill. My symptoms have all flared up and come back to bite me. I am mostly just sitting here, being.

Do you see now? Do you see how far from the norm our lives are? I wish my doctors were reading this! Remember I am lucky to be able to get out at all. So many of my friends cannot. Many of my friends are too poorly to get out of bed, never mind the house. All I wanted was to forget about my poorly life for a few hours over my birthday. That was too much to ask for.

Some people say that they would love our lifestyle; to not have to work and to ‘slob’ around all day. To those people, you are more than welcome to come and swap with me or my friends. You seem to have forgotten that we do not live the high life. You seem to have forgotten that we are poorly all of the time…

8 hours out of 168 is too much. This was a one off and I do not regret it one bit.