Summer Sickness

So, I’ve been sick for about a week now. Every morning I wake up and try to convince myself that I’m not sick. I’m generally back in bed by noon.

I hate being sick. I hate how absolutely useless I become. And when I say useless, I mean useless. If I don’t spend the day in bed when I’m sick I end up staying sick for weeks.

Luckily, I don’t get sick that often anymore, maybe once or twice a season, but when I was younger I got sick so often that it led to a special kind of self-loathing. Why me? I’d ask myself. What’s wrong with me? Why do I always get sick? No one else gets sick so often as I do. It must be my fault.

No doubt if I were religious I would have believed that I had done something to offend God and that He was punishing me with a constant stream of illness.

It was so frustrating, always being sick. Once I was sick for so long that a classmate had forgotten I was in their class and they asked me if I was new when I finally came back to school. My near constant illness meant that I hardly participated in any social activities during high school. I never went to parties. I missed school dances and had to leave prom early because I got too dizzy dancing.

The worst was having to drop out of college because I got too sick to care for myself let alone go to class and complete assignments. It’s difficult to describe the exact brand of misery I felt, knowing that my body had failed me so spectacularly and so expensively. I was ashamed. I wanted to rip apart my body and build myself a new one, a better one, one that wasn’t always stopping and starting and stopping again.

I’ve worked a lot to improve my health. Mostly, changing my diet has been the biggest factor in keeping illness away. I’ve cut so much out of my diet that it’s probably easier to ask me what I can eat rather than what I can’t eat. I also try to avoid high stress situations and to live as simply as possible.

And it works, for the most part. This week, not so much. But I’ve also learned not to blame my body so much. Illness is a reality of life. It possesses no malice of intent. In fact, it possesses no conscious intent at all beyond self propagation. There is no blame to be placed, no finger to be pointed, but that doesn’t make being sick any less frustrating. My mind still races while my body lies still, unable to do much beyond read and eat toast.

I’m finally starting to feel better. I suspect that by tomorrow I’ll be on my feet again.

Thank you for reading.