Photo by Rodrigo Rodriguez on Unsplash
I’ve felt a little more upbeat this week. It’s quite hard to say why.
But then, looking for the perfect answer is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. There’s something about the vagueries of life that no one can ever fully explain.
I do feel a bit better with my health compared to last week. My nausea has reduced somewhat, my sleep seems calmer and I feel more balanced and upright. But honestly, these are relatively minor. Nothing has particularly shifted otherwise. It’s why I must admit that a mood uplift has hit me slightly by surprise.
It’s also a pretty stark contrast to last week, where I was feeling particularly despondent. I felt a few things knocked me down. Somerset losing to Yorkshire, effectively ending hopes of a first County Championship title was pretty demoralising. But alas, that is just how sports goes.
Closer to home, I got a letter saying I needed to pay an additional 2700 euros tax by the end of November. I did know it was coming, but the amount was higher and the deadline stricter than I had hoped. Mentally I started bracing myself to a few months of being extra frugal. The confusing part is that I don’t even feel like I spend much anyway. My only real outings for the last month have been across the road to the supermarket.
But the real hammer blow last week was receiving my blood test results. Despite several months of targeted effort, my insulin resistance was actually a bit higher. I ended up feeling pretty despondent about it all. Probably for the first time, I started to contemplate that I may never really recover. My conclusion was to write off the rest of 2026. It wasn’t a particularly motivating way of looking at the next few months.
Yet weirdly, I think this mentality has actually done me some good. The less pressure I can put on recovery, the better things seem to go. My attempts at pushing my mind and body into improving has generally ended up rather unsuccessful. The times where I seem to see progress is when I let my body do its thing. Perhaps this is having its positive effect on me this week.
I’ve also reflected how much calmer I am compared to a year ago. Before, life felt like being hit constantly by new whirlwinds. My body was constantly throwing up new inexplicable issues, whilst my mind was struggling with understanding what was going on with my life.
Now, I do feel like some answers have been settled, though plenty still remain. For those that I can’t answer, I’m more at peace with. Or at the very least, I realise that fretting about them only makes things worse.
I do feel more in alignment with a rhythm of life that suits my personality. I’ve gotten used to a more solitary life. For a long time I found it very difficult as I would often feel very lonely. Now, I feel more at peace with it. The attempts to fit in and win at the career rat race was destroying my soul until I inevitably hit collapse.
Whilst there are obvious downsides to less social interactions, the upside is that I also get far less judgement and expectations put on me. In a strange way, this does give a feeling of freedom.
Perhaps peace makes such a difference, not because of magical happiness, but because it means that slow, boring change is far more bearable.
I’m no longer a cat on a hot tin roof searching desperately for a way out.