I’ve worn out my positive attitude

I am so very tired.  The huge act of will it takes to do every tiny thing.  The condescending approval when I manage something more than usual, approval that says, ‘see, you don’t have to be so lazy’.  I’m tired of fighting to get decent medical attention.  Sick of all the health care people playing tug-of-war with me.  I wish they would talk to each other, work as a team.  Come to me when they can agree what I should do.  And I’m sick of trying to grab those rare and random good days and schedule medical appointments on them, when there are always more people I need to see than good days or money to see them. 

You know what else?  I’m tired of drumming up bogus hopes to live for.  Tired of dreaming that one day I’ll be perfectly healthy and beautiful and twenty-one again.  Every time I hear that one of my problems is permanent, it threatens to tear down my whole reason for living. 

I’m in a holding pattern, and the fuel is getting low.  I just want to collapse and cry about it sometimes, but there’s no-one to catch me.  I don’t think anyone knows what a vast amount of effort every day takes.  Even when I’m asleep it feels like I’m treading water. 

The really silly thing is, if by some miracle or wonder of modern medicine I did get passably well, I don’t think I’d have any idea what to do with myself.  I don’t have big dreams, parked there waiting to fly.  I’ve been watching people around me graduate, marry, buy houses and have babies.  I’ve been watching them get careers, businesses, money.  And travel far, long and often.  And me, I’m still sitting here, like a stopped wind-up toy, as though my life stopped at twenty-three with the chronic fatigue, and the key in my back got stuck.  In some ways, I still feel like that lost Arts student with no idea what to do next.