Last Day of 2017

Can having a cold become an existential quagmire? If you’re of my ilk, the answer is yes!

It would be nice to write something poignant for New Year’s Eve, but truth of the matter is I’ve been so sick lately that I’m lucky to string two coherent words together. Don’t worry, it’s “just a cold,” but it’s just a cold in the sense that depression is “just feeling down” and the two go hand in hand.

It’s one thing to feel like you’re not contributing to the goals of the household, but it’s quite another when you feel like you can’t contribute, that you’re simply unable to be productive. When your energy is tapped and just standing up makes you dizzy, it’s rather difficult to complete tasks that require any kind of cognition. Looking for work, trying to write, and frankly trying to recreate yourself in a new professional direction don’t really play into your suit when you’re sick and have been without a decent sleep for over a week. When a person is gainfully employed by a company, there’s a bit of comfort knowing that you can still be paid to take care of yourself. When you work for yourself, or are barely working at all, the loss of those days to convalescence is highlighted.

And that’s when depression joins forces with your cold to crush your vulnerable self worth. I was sick over the holidays last year as well, while I was still working, and even then I felt useless and guilty. I was terrified that I wasn’t able to do my job and that someone would call me on it, even though I had the time off anyway.

So my survival tactic right now is something that I should be doing anyway, focusing on what’s in front of me, to throw out a popular catchphrase, to “be present” in the moment. My worry surrounds those things that I can’t do because of a lack of energy, they are things the will occur in the future. The only thing I can control is this current moment, so I need to slow down and zero in on that if I’m to stop beating myself up.