Every Second Hurts

I imagine every chronically ill person at one time or another says the motto of our people: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It’s exhausting to be exhausted. It’s boring and frustrating to not have the energy to avoid being bored and frustrated, and always being both is a drag.

I’m going through something right now. I do not know if it’s something actually pathological—lupus is the great imitator so this could be a new version of a flare1—but if it is its comparatively mild2. I almost want it to be pathological. If it isn’t illness, then it’s just my body just being generally run down from misuse and neglect.

I try to take care of myself, but when you’re chronically ill there’s always a feeling that you could and should be doing more. You get a definite feeling of ownership of how shitty you feel—like if you could just get out and exercise some more you wouldn’t be too tired to get out and exercise some more. It’s all so fucking self-reflexive it drives me crazy. If you’ve grown up with the good old-fashioned Protestant Work Ethic you can feel immensely guilty, like you’re responsible for your own pain and exhaustion.

I have so much that I want to do and no energy to actually do it. Even writing this feels like I’m operating at the limits of my abilities right now. I want to be an active person actively experiencing my life and I don’t always feel that’s within my power.

I often feel like I’m only the real version of myself only a couple hours a day. Not even consecutive hours, even. It depends on how much pain I’m feeling, how fatigued I am, when I was able to get to sleep last night, how much coffee I had during the day, and so on. Only a little of that feels like it results from any direct choices I’ve made.

I feel guilt for feeling like crap because there are things that I could do that might help me out and build up my strength and make me feel better about it, but even those days I wake up from a full night of sleep after a completely sober night spent reading on my couch, I feel at best marginally better than I do on most days when I don’t act at my best.

A normal day after a full night of sleep is now, on average, worse than I felt in my 20s after a weekend-long bender. I feel worse waking up in my own bed on a quiet Thursday than I did the night in my 20s that I fell asleep on the A train going home to Washington Heights and woke up with the sunrise at JFK.

The consequences of failure can be pretty rough, but the consequences of success aren’t much better.

I’m struck with the awful feeling—that feels like Knowledge—that my one life is wasting away and I don’t have the energy to live it right now. I snap to an awareness that my life is dribbling away and I can’t even focus on it hard enough to actually live it. I’ll sit here watching videos on YouTube or TikTok and the algorithm will happily spit out a scene for me from The Bear with “Every second counts,” and I’ll be confronted with the fact that I don’t even have the energy to watch The Bear right now, much less live like every second counts.

It’s hard to make every second count when every second hurts.

The comics character the Green Lantern has a magic ring that is powered by on “willpower”—specifically the ability to overcome fear and impose his willpower to remake reality. In the hands of a writer this makes the Green Lantern power arbitrary, since they’ll always find the willpower to triumph at the climax of the story. This is also an action movie trope—no matter how many times the hero has been shot they’ll always find the strength to push even harder and triumph at the end when it’s necessary.

Man, do I wish that’s how it worked for me. If you’ve spent your entire life watching movies the way I have you could be excused for thinking that’s how it works; that trying harder is all it takes and that trying harder is easy. And so I find blame for myself for not just pushing through, keeping it together, doing what needs to be done. It’s exhausting to be exhausted. To feel you’re responsible for not being able to do what you can’t do. In the movies you just need to snap out of it.

Easier said than done.

I tried to explain this to a friend last week through through the story of Sisyphus, only to realize I was regurgitating what I could remember of The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s not a great sign when you realize you’re speeding down the same road as Camus. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he wrote. Camus felt our life is absurd, and that absurdity should inspire revolt and a glorious struggle to fill our hearts. But it’s hard to motivate yourself towards glorious struggle; it feels much more appropriate to motivate yourself just enough to get up and do this shit day after day while it hurts and you fail. To put in the hours, doing the bare minimum, getting the expected results, and clocking out at the end of the day and hope you’ll get over the hump some other day.

One must imagine Sisyphus quiet quitting.

No big introduction here. One of the best music videos for one of my favorite bands.

That’s all. See you later, once I find the energy again.