But you're the least lazy person I've ever met! my friend says when I try to describe the breadth and depth of my recent sloth. It's total: I don't want to do a damn thing. Don't want to bake bread and don't want to garden and don't want to write. Don't want to go to Morning Prayer. Don't want to talk on the phone. Don't want to go to the twenty doctors I have to consult every time I get a hangnail. Just don't want to. Tired. Tired from nothing.
But it's not from nothing. Just look at your schedule. You just worked a whole weekend, my husband points out. He can be a very logical man -- I hate that in a person.
Worked? I sat in a chair and spoke. Why should that make me tired? Time was, it would have energized me. Now? I am willing to play Solitaire and Scrabble on my iPhone. That's it, more or less. Everything else is under duress.
The way out of this? Very gently, in little pieces: do one thing. A small one. Can't do Morning Prayer? Just lie here and repeat the parts I know by heart. Just prune one rosebush. See if I can find someone who will drag me out to get a little exercise and to clear the cobwebs a bit.
And don't look back. There was a time when my level of activity was extraordinary. I'd get up before dawn and write, get the girls to school, work all day, come home, make supper and then direct a play all night, then we'd come home and I'd listen to music or chat on the phone to unwind a bit before bed. No need to unwind now -- I fall into bed and into sleep within seconds. Mustn't look back there and compare my current self to the old me. That way lies madness.
We are who we are now. Maybe who we were has formed us, but it no longer IS us. I am not who I was, nor am I who I will be, though all three of those women are related. I can only be who I am, right now, and return to the world, bit by bit.
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