Chronic fatigue and the blurring of boundaries between personal spaces

If you live in a space long enough you learn its every nook and cranny. I know exactly how many steps will take me from one wall to the other. How much streetlight is going to spill in through my window each night. I know because there are days when sleep presses down on me like a weighted blanket until I have no choice but to retreat to bed. And days when I lie there, still overwhelmed with the need to just lie down, wondering if relief might come if I could clip through the frame like a bad video game.

It’s often advised to separate your work space from your living space. I have tried. Rarely, I succeed. Even so, despite my best efforts I wake every day inches from my workplace, the other side of my bed. Over the slow course of years I’ve come to accept this is my life. Yet there are still days when my world shrinks to the four posters of my bed and claustrophobia comes crawling under my skin.

Good days aren’t a reprieve, lest I overexert myself and once more end up confined here. And while I’m not immune to the desperation of doing something, anything, on the occasions I can, I’m not immune to fear either. Chronic fatigue isn’t purely a physical affliction. It’s mental exhaustion too, and that makes work a struggle. In turn, it’s made harder when every day I wake up inches from my work space.

The bed/room is no longer a place of rest. I can’t remember the last time it was. I’m fortunate enough to enjoy my work but every day it haunts me. All I can do is turn my back on it but the awareness of everything that I have to do continues to breathe down my back. And there’s always something to be done. For all my efforts to put it out of sight, out of mind, I just can’t.

But there’s no escaping that this is a place of rest either. Working in bed does make me feel more tired than when not. That is what it’s for, after all. Sleep. My mattress is more comfortable than the kitchen table or the living room couch. My duvet is cosy. My pillows are soft. To work here is to sink into the quicksand of sleep. And while exhaustion plagues me everywhere, the fight is only made harder here.

It even seeps into the weekends, into breaks. Be it YouTube or books, there comes the tug of a little voice at the back of my mind. Did I phrase that right? Has that email come? That’s a great turn of phrase. I’m so glad I wrote it down. I wrote it down, didn’t I? All innocent. Easy. Give me a second, and I can fix this. I can check. I’ll wade through my inbox. I can make note. But after one word comes another. Maybe that sentence works, the next? No. That can be tweaked. Then the next. And the next. Until it’s rewritten.

This is how I wake up, days later. Or a week. Maybe a month. Perhaps months. My work, slower now than it ever has been. My need for breaks bleeding into my work the way that my work bleeds into my breaks. The realisation that I’ve worked every day since. If this is a wound it’s one I don’t know how to cauterise.

Half an hour is too long now for me not to be lured to another tab. My focus has shrunk and is shrinking still. My mind is becoming as cramped as my physical world and it haunts me. I know there are ways to fight it, to claw it back. You have to force yourself to read a paragraph until you’re bored. Then read it again. You have to clear your desk. You have to set up a dedicated work space. But I’m so tired. Just thinking about it makes me want to curl up and escape into sleep.

Nothing can be everything. But sometimes it has to be. You just have to make do.