behind the scenes: I’ve never been so low

tl;dr: Everything at the moment is just so difficult, and requires so much effort, mental and physical. I’m so exhausted. My mood just decays a little more each day.

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Looks like I spoke too soon. In last week’s Weekly Digest email, I wrote:

I posted three movie reviews last week. Three! Feature-length reviews, too. Incredible.

Am I back? Maybe! I honestly still do not feel like my old self, but maybe I’m getting there?

I don’t know. I am still facing so many challenges to my health, both physical and mental. The months ahead are going to be tough. I really am worried that I am never going to be fully, truly well again, and that scares me.

But it felt really good to lose myself in writing.

I’ll try to do that again this week…

And then I completely, utterly, and in all other ways failed to do that again. I was almost totally absent from Flick Filosopher last week. I didn’t even get to the Daily Stream posts, and I’ve really been trying to at least manage those.

*sigh*

Some of that is down to the big freelance copyediting job I was working on, which inspired last week’s Loaded Question, which was incredibly demanding and took up so much of my time. But mostly it was because of the emotional and psychological roller coaster I’ve been on since… well, since the pandemic began (and it’s not over yet), but it accelerated like crazy last summer and into autumn and winter, when I finally caught Covid, my mother got very sick and died, and then my own health issue dramatically ramped up. I wrote in early February about the pain and limitations on my life that I’ve been dealing with while I await hip-replacement surgery. It’s almost three months on from that, and my mood just decays a little more each day.

I wrote this in an email to a friend recently:

Honestly, everything is absolutely terrible with me. I have never been this low in my entire life… and that’s really saying something. I am so depressed, so full of despair. Between my mom, my hip, and the state of the world, I always on the verge of tears. And sometimes I just can’t help but give in to them. Like on the bus. Recently I was on the bus and the driver was like, “This bus is being delayed, everyone should probably get on the bus behind because that will go first,” and I just burst out sobbing cuz it was too much. The poor driver was startled. And I just sat on that bus until it moved again. (It wasn’t even that long, actually.)

Everything at the moment is just so difficult, and requires so much effort, mental and physical. I’m so exhausted.

So that’s where I am. I actually do now have a date for my surgery. I won’t yet say exactly when that is, because I don’t want to jinx it. (Not that I’m superstitious!) But with the current chaos in the NHS, there’s always a chance that it could be postponed. (I fully support the ongoing series of strikes by NHS doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other workers, though.) It’s sooner than I had hoped, however, and I’ll keep you all up to date as the time approaches.

Still, at my lowest moments, I wonder how I am going to manage to drag myself — literally and figuratively — to that day. It’s very difficult to see the light at the end of this tunnel, which has been so long and so dark for so long.

In the meantime, I have two more copyediting jobs for that same client lined up — one due this week and one in early May — because I’m gonna be out of commission for a while after the surgery and I’m trying to build up a little financial cushion. And those are going to eat into my time and my spoons. But I am going to try to get my brain back in gear this week for some fun movie stuff.