To the Bones Tired

I’m exhausted. It’s hard to sit up and get out of bed in the mornings. It’s hard to smile at my kids and husband and go about my day, moving and talking and participating. I’m not low/depressed per say, just tired. This tired goes beyond mentally and physically, it’s down to my bones. I’ve increased my caffeine intake, but I feel as though I can take a ten hour nap even after I drink a ton of coffee. When I take a nap I feel just as tired as when I laid down. Nothing seems to be able to wake me up.

This is usually how I feel when I’m low. But I don’t have any other symptoms. I don’t have the body aches or loss of interest in things. I’m just tired. This tired goes either two ways: I sit down and don’t move unless absolutely necessary, or I don’t sit down and stay busy because I know that sitting down will result in me not getting back up. When I stay busy, it’s almost like a manic energy takes over. Like I have to clean everything in sight.

I think a lot of this “tired” is stress. We’ve been in quarantine for what feels like forever and there’s five of us stuck together with no real privacy. There’s the stress of my loved ones getting the virus, there’s the stress from not seeing literally anyone other than my immediate family, and there’s the stress from my surgeries. I had the mastectomy thrown at me out of the blue, I had one surgery done, and then thanks to my insurance I had the back and forth on whether or not I was having the mastectomy. I ended up not having it done, so now I’m back to stressing about breast cancer.

That’s a lot to stress over. No wonder my anorexia has come forward. I don’t want to say that it’s “come back” because it never truly leaves. It’s always in the back of my mind. I have to do my best to hide my lack of eating, and anxiety while eating, from my daughters. I know that the odds of them getting an eating disorder is higher thanks to mine, and that thought makes me sick to my stomach. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

The other culprit may be my lack of good, deep sleep. I wake up dozens of times and have trouble falling back asleep each time. It also doesn’t help that my youngest ends up in bed with us every night. Some time around midnight she makes her way into our room and up into our bed. She likes to sleep sideways, which means I get her head or feet in my back. It also impacts my husband’s sleep, so that means there’s two sleep deprived parents trying to wrangle in three little kids.

The best thing I can tell myself is that the odds of this being a permanent feeling are very low. Most moods and feelings I have are temporary. A few good nights of sleep could snap me out of this. Maybe my youngest will stay in her bed one night and I’ll find that I feel better the next morning. There’s a lot of ways I can snap out of this and feel like a better mom, I just have to do my best to push through until that happens.