Sometimes, You Just Need Rest.

Even in the worst of my pain it is still difficult for me to accept rest. My body knows what it needs, but what’s stopping me from allowing it?

The honest answer is the reason why my body fights rest to this extent lies in the onset in my illness. After my diagnosis, I had to wait five painful months for a shunt to be implanted in my brain. In those months I used sleep as a way to mitigate my worsening symptoms, since at that time many of the hours of my day felt too painful to live. After my surgery I suffered from neurasthenia, a type of chronic fatigue that occurs after the brain has been touched. In my real life this affected me in many ways, whether it was the pain seeping into my dreams during rest, or having to set six alarms only to routinely miss my 8 am class. Once I started to emerge from the fog of the surgery, an association was drawn in my brain that I still can’t seem to erase: when my body rests, it means I’m ill.

All of the sudden I noticed I avoided napping at all costs even though it seemed to be the only thing that was accelerating my healing process. After having to sedate myself with medication for months just to survive, it became hard to view rest the same way as I did before. Instead of a natural part of the healing process, napping and rest became my body’s signal that there was something wrong. Instead of napping in the afternoon after a night of tossing and turning in pain, I am kept awake until my body forces me to get up and stop thinking about the feelings going on in my body.

Instead of a remedy, rest became an enemy.

In some cases I’ve even noticed physical symptoms arising whenever I try and take rest. When I spend 90% of my day powering through pain, slowing down and resting can sometimes remind me of the pressure I’m (literally) under. In order to achieve rest in the day, I have to be mentally prepared to face an onslaught of pain and sedated memories in order to get there.

My brother in law is a musician, and for the past two months I’ve been planning on going to a winery where he was set to play a gig today. When I leave the house, especially if it requires travel, I have a 1-2 hour window where I can put aside the pain and enjoy myself. So when I realized this winery was 2 hours away (not 1.5 hours like I had thought), I was faced with the question I’ve had to answer too many times for my liking the past four years: do I risk suddenly feeling ill to better my mental health with friends and family, or do I take care of my body and spend (another) night in with television and Uber Eats? Unfortunately, I realized I had no choice once I figured out I would be two hours away from home if something went wrong. This circumstance, like many others, made me choose rest even though I would much rather be pushing aside the pain, listening to live music with my service dog and feeling a sense of normalcy, even if only for a hour.

At the time my brother in law was set to start his show, I glanced over at Rumi tucked in Griffin’s arms tonight, and it gently reminded me that rest isn’t always a “waste of time.” At the end of the day, while I would’ve loved to watch my family member play, I find solace in the fact that maybe tonight’s rest will result in healthy days coming sooner, and at least I won’t have to face the consequences of post-show exhaustion and overstimulation. Tonight I will rest peacefully knowing I chose the last few hours of my day wisely, and the only challenge facing me tonight is having to remind myself that I did not “miss out” because of my illness. In reality, I took the night to relish in the things I love: Griffin, Rumi, cooking, ice cream, and very terrible reality TV.

I guess when I put it that way, tonight doesn’t sound so bad after all.