chronic fatigue the first thing

A woman named Holly suggested that I had chronic fatigue a couple of years before I was diagnosed, I told her it couldn't be. I still feel guilty for not acknowledging that she was right, more about that later. Finally one day I said, half joking to my husband, that surely everyone couldn't be in as much pain as I was that morning. He said "probably not" and I realized that I was dealing with something real. By that time I was limping after a long day, and groaning into life every morning. That was six years ago now, and over those years of thinking about it I guess I probably had symptoms as far back as my teenage years. After diagnosis I refused to talk about it for a year or two. I did not want to face the conversations that would inevitably come. I expected two things - those who had a cure they wanted me to try and those who were sick themselves and just wanted to talk about how sick we both were. I still resist both of those conversations. The first because I'm always already trying a cure and you can only try one cure at a time - otherwise how will you know what's working. Despite the good intentions behind people's suggestions of cures I ought to try, they can't understand that I spend days at a time researching these things, and months trying them, and so I have trouble with something somebody heard was helping somebody's sister in law, or with the one cure that cured them and so surely will cure everyone else.
The other conversation about how sick we are I resist also because I'm not really interested in how sick we are. This will show me to be duplicitous on both counts because I am going to talk about the things which have helped me, and maybe now and then - especially in mid winter - about how sick I am.
The conversations which surprised me, I guess I was naive, were the ones in which everyone wanted to talk about what I think caused it. So let's get that out here right away, to make a proper start on this blog. I think it's caused by a whole bunch of factors together. Here are some possibilities:
It's cultural: I grew up upper middle class and in my social class not a day goes by when we don't tell our children, and each other, that we must be successful. I don't know if this is just a middle class thing or universally true. "You could write a book!" is my favorite example of this mind frame. We keep thinking, 'if only' we, or our children, did things right, and wrote a book about it, we would be whatever it is we think we ought to be. And if we're only average, well, it's just never good enough. Then we grow up to be average and our society accepts -moreover needs - us that way but we still keep hearing the message - it's never good enough.
I think it's familial - in my family I repeatedly received the message, "if I only did things right I'd be whatever I think I ought to be" ... We hear this or receive it wordlessly as children and parents.
I think it's personal, being someone who internalizes things, and feels guilty over every mistake I've ever made, I felt I could never do well enough. In my eyes any unpleasant occurrence must be my fault, and any mistake was a failure. I felt if only I could do things right I'd be whatever I thought I ought to be.
In my head is that song from My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn - "In my own little corner in my own little chair I can be whatever I want to be." We tell our children "you can be anything you want to be" because we don't want to limit their dreams, but the truth is that what we say is only true for the very lucky, very talented few. I met a man who was responsible for monitoring and sending out repair teams for the power grid for the city of Zurich. Important, yes, successful, in a manner of speaking, the money is good, but it certainly is no child's dream.
And I think it's physical. It could have come from a virus, or from an undersized pituitary gland, or an overactive nervous system, or from any of the many other physical factors that have been proposed in the many medical theories out there.
But my conclusion is that it is all of these things together. You cannot separate mind from body. Our attitudes towards ourselves influence our bodies which shape the way we think about things which dictates the way we feed ourselves which influences the way we feel about ourselves which dictates the way we work which controls the way we exercise which overcomes our common sense which makes us insensitive to what our bodies are telling us, and on it goes.
There's no one cause. There's no one cure.
The story of my recovery, my struggles with nothing, new worlds I've found, things I've had to give up, things I've learned to value or am trying to learn to value, will unfold over the coming days.

May You Be With the Force.

S 10