Here's another thing I'm noticing about myself since doing GAPS: I actually want to do things!! I remember years ago, even if I had no one to hang out with I'd go out and walk around town, window shop, browse bookstores and then go to a nice coffee shop on my days off. Lately, all I want to do on my day off is hang out in t-shirts and yoga pants and play video games. Even though I had a lot of nostalgia about just kicking around town I only did it if I was going to hang out with G and his friends. It wasn't just the painful feet either, although that had definitely something to do with it. I just had didn't want to anymore. I think this was because my lack of energy.
My friend's know that I almost never do anything during the week. It's hard enough for me to get home, feed the cats, and pick up a little around the apartment. Even during the weekends I don't really have time because I need to spend one day shopping, cooking, and cleaning for the week, which I do this way: work for a half hour, rest for an hour, work for another half hour, rest for another hour (or thereabouts). I couldn't do sustained work for very long and would have to rest. I would get (most) everything done by the end of the day but it took all day long. I'm usually still cooking or folding clothes at 9:00 at night. And if I went out or did something on Saturday, then I felt like I had no time to rest all week, because I have to do my chores on Sunday and then work all week and I'd end up feeling totally unrested.
Things always took so long, because I always need to take breaks and rest. I could get things done, they just take forever. This means that I had to be very selective about what I wanted to focus on. Recently this has been my work on Jungian psychology, which I needed to take a break from while doing all this cooking and shopping and even thinking for GAPS, in addition to being exhausted from dealing with die off or whatever this greater than usual lack of energy has been. And it's not purely about physical exhaustion although there is that. It's also largely mental exhaustion, I just don't have the mental capacity to focus for too long on one thing.
I realized I had the female form of ADD years ago, and went to a psychiatrist who put me on Adderall. This was useful but not a perfect cure - I still had a hard time motivating myself to do things that I found boring. When I got back into Jungian psychology I didn't want to take it anymore because I find that it interferes with my feelings, and I don't know what I'm actually feeling when I take it (as a thinking type I have problems knowing what I'm feeling in the moment as it is, I didn't need a drug making it even harder.)
One of the things I'd resigned myself to, though, was the fact that I was never going to be able to accomplish a lot. I had a very limited supply of energy, and a large part of that had to go to taking care of basic needs, like going to work, or making food for myself. I also had to spend some of it taking physical and mental breaks, because even if I have enough energy in my body to do something, that doesn't mean that I have enough mental capacity to focus on it.
Well, I can't be sure but I've been feeling like I want to do things! This is something for a miracle for me. While I was absolutely exhausted last week, since Saturday I've had twinges of wanting to get up and get out and do stuff. I'm still taking it a bit slowly - Saturday was an example of me biting off more than I could chew - but the feeling hasn't been going away. It's still too early to say "yea" or "nay" about whether or not this is actually happening - it's still only been about 2 weeks - but I'm really hoping that as I heal more I'll have more and more of that feeling again.
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