That Very Delicate Balance
As something of a followup to the other day’s post about my toilet (I almost wrote “on”, which could be taken the wrong way), fatigue, exertion, executive dysfunction, and ticket theory, it’s maybe a good time to relate a few things I said on social media media about the current context of all of this.
One of the unhad convos with my doctor, who thinks the answer to my fatigue woes is some simple strength training, is that given that even they caution I’d need to be slow and careful so as not to overdo it, and since these days I’m basically in an energy equilibrium on a day-to-day basis, if they want me to do any strength training they need to explain to me what activities to drop.
Do I drop scooping the cat litter every day? Do I drop walking six blocks to read over coffee and back, the only thing I get to do out of the house in a vaguely social environment? Do I drop a grocery errand that needed to happen?
Were I simply to add strength training to my existing energy budget, that would be overdoing it and I’d crash. So, I need to know what they think I’m supposed to drop from the current budget. That doesn’t even address ticket theory and the question of what if my brain doesn’t issue a strength training ticket on this, that, or the other day.
Just recently I already had to drop the daily breakfast skillet I’d been doing, because both the prep and the cleanup were crashing my energy budget. That doesn’t suggest there’s really any wiggle room.
Where, then, in all of this am I supposed to put strength training, exactly?
None of this even reaches the part of the fatigue we haven’t talked about at all, wherein even cognitive work can crash me—something I got into glancingly in my open letter to taxpayers. Explain to me how strength training, simple or otherwise, is supposed to address that all kinds of work, whether physical or cognitive, can crash me if I don’t make corresponding reductions elsewhere in my energy budget, which already is about as finely tuned as it can get in order to support living independently.
Disrupting that very delicate balance seems like a dangerous game to me, even if my doctor could explain what cuts to make to my budget in order to afford simple strength training.
Addenda
- Three days later, and the extra exertion on Saturday for the World Forestry Center and ill-considered push to also hit Oregon Zoo, and the extra exertion on Sunday to clean the toilet after going even longer than I usually do before getting to that, and the cognitive work of writing blog posts on Sunday and on Tuesday, and the illicit extra hour I stayed up to read last night, together continue to conspire to dysregulate me, and just walking two blocks to breakfast on Wednesday has left me feeling completely bushed.