Work in the time of fatigue
I’ve been tired lately. Clinically tired. I got COVID (again) in July, it was weird (again), and I haven’t been fully awake since. It’s not Long COVID, though. It’s hypothyroidism, a condition where your thyroid can’t make enough of the hormones it’s supposed to make and as a result, your metabolism slows down. That doesn’t sound that bad, but trust me: it’s bad. I had no appetite, I couldn’t digest food, my hair was falling out, I was gaining weight faster than I ever had, I had brain fog and concentration problems far more debilitating than during my first Weird COVID, and, most especially, I was exhausted. I’d get up after 8+ hours of sleep, eat breakfast, and need to go back to bed for a three-hour nap. There were periods when I couldn’t write in complete sentences, and others when I couldn’t read. It felt like my very self was dissolving, and I didn’t have the energy to care.
I’m pretty sure I’d started to develop hypothyroidism before my second case of COVID (remember slow running? Yeah, maybe I really should have been able to go a little faster), but it feels like the infection multiplied it. In some ways I’m grateful for that, because hypothyroidism can develop slowly over years without you noticing, always finding excuses for why you’re feeling worse and worse. For example, aging and dying, which happen to all of us but usually, it turns out, not quite as fast as they were happening to me.
I’m feeling a lot better now that I’m taking medication, but not all the way better, since I’m still trying to find the right dose. I’ve been able to resume the newsletter, some tentative book writing, yoga, and occasionally leaving the house, but I still can’t do interviews or commit to anything with a deadline, because I can’t predict what I’ll be capable of day-to-day. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it was like to realize the self is, in fact, an illusion as I watched mine disappear, and how much of a mindfuck it is that the challenging things I’d spent the last two years learning to be comfortable with—namely, needing naps, gaining weight, and respecting my energetic limits—were in fact symptoms of a slowly worsening health crisis. I hope to be able to write more about those things eventually, but I don’t have the energy yet. For now, I want to share how I’m (slowly, unpredictably, non-linearly) getting back to work.
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Before hypothyroidism, one of my guiding lights for creative work was the idea that motivation comes after action, which I previously wrote about here.
This is so completely contrary to how we are taught to think. Motivation is supposed to inspire action, right? You can’t take action without motivation! It’s only natural that if the low mood cycle has sapped away your motivation, your capacity for action will also vanish. Oh well. I guess you’re stuck being a bad person who doesn’t do anything. Still. Again. Forever.
That, my friends, is a lie. I know!! I couldn’t believe it either!!! But the truth is, you don’t have to be motivated to do a thing. You just have to do the thing, a thing—the tiniest, most insignificant, easiest thing—and your motivation will bloom. You will feel accomplished instead of drained. You will be a person who does things. And a person who does things can keep doing things.
This philosophy is still somewhat mind-blowing to me, and all the more so because I know it’s true. I couldn’t have gotten through 2020 without it. If you can muster the will to do one tiny thing, you can ride that momentum for the rest of the day, and then the rest of your life. It’s amazing when it works.
It’s not working for me now. I keep wanting it to, I keep trying, I keep thinking maybe today is the day it comes back. One day soon, I hope, I’ll be taking the right dose of medication and it will come back. But for now I’m being forced to learn, again and again, what a lack of motivation means when I’m sick. It doesn’t mean I need a constructive little push to break a self-sabotaging cycle. It means my body isn’t ready, and it’s trying to tell me that.
In this state, any and all pushes, however loving and well-intentioned, don’t lead to motivation. They lead to crashes. Sometimes I’m ok with that. After months of feeling psychically and socially erased, I now can and will see my friends, even if I have to take an extra nap the next day. I will write my newsletter and work on my book, even if I can tell the quality of the work isn’t quite where it was, and where I hope to get back to. I will go on walks and do yoga, even if things that used to be easy are currently hard. But I also know that when I feel myself approaching a limit, it’s not a chance to see how far I can push past it. If I do, I won’t get far, and I’ll soon be very sorry.
This is frustrating. All the tools and tricks I’ve developed for dealing with the small problems of my life (for example, writing is scary) are irrelevant to the big problem (my thyroid doesn’t work). Beyond irrelevant, actually. More like actively harmful. Right now, a lack of motivation isn’t a low fuel light I can top off with a little bit of effort. It’s a wailing siren, telling me to stop right there.
So for the moment, I can’t (or at least, I shouldn’t) take action if I don’t have any motivation. But what does motivation before action feel like? I’ve rarely felt it in my working life up to this point. Now I have the chance to learn: it feels like ease. I know I’m ready for something because doing it feels good, right from the beginning. If I’m procrastinating, it doesn’t mean I need to trick myself into getting down to work. It means I shouldn’t be trying to do that work today.
I’ve been moving towards ease for a while, and it’s hard to fight against all the cultural conditioning that equates it with laziness. It’s even harder at this moment in my life, when I’ve come back from my sickest but am still not completely well. That kind of low-level malaise is exactly the thing I’ve trained myself to push through, and up until now, I’ve always gotten results and been rewarded for them. Faced with a challenge that requires a different set of tools, I can feel a new relationship with my work incubating, one that’s based not on fear and shame but on ease and joy. When this is over, I hope I can remember how viscerally obvious it is now that writing shouldn’t feel like a burden. It should feel like a gift.
Programming note
For reasons made clear in this post, this is my last newsletter of the year. Happy hibernation, and I’ll be back in your inboxes in January, hopefully fully and happily medicated.