The Day After Two Weeks of Sick Days

Two weeks ago, the last Heartbeat log I put up on Instagram included the line “Realised the sore throat, aching muscles, and disrupted equilibrium may mean I’m getting sick (do not want).”

The next morning, I woke up discovered that I was right on both fronts: I was sick with the flu, and I truly did not want it. Work ground to a halt, the illness getting an assist from a very sick guinea pig that needed more trips to the vet and help eating every couple of hours.

I’m only just getting back to doing work-related things today, forcing my reluctant brain to look at things I’ve been ignoring for a fortnight without shying away because getting on top of things will be hard. It will still be a disrupted work day, because we’ve still got a very sick guinea pig who needs to be hand-fed every few hours, but there’s the possibility of getting stuff done around that.

Sick days are hard when you have a freelancer mindset (and you live without sick leave). While I’ve been physically better for a few days, my brain is still lagging behind in the foothills of anxiety. My subconscious keeps running around in panicked loops: “We’re so far behind. We’ll never catch up. This is why writing is a terrible idea–let’s just pack it all in and go look for a different job.”

My conscious brain is acknowledging that all those things are possible, but unlikely, and that doing nothing will almost certainly result in getting further behind, so it’s probably better to do something even if it’s not everything I want to get done.

The trick, unsurprisingly, is to cleave to the familiar routines that take thinking out of the equation: start a logbook page for the day; write a blog post to get my brain back into a place where it thinks about conveying things to an audience with words; open a notebook and put the pen next to it, even if I don’t think I’ll write.

The conscious brain knows that I’ll fret much less once things are underway, once the work ceases to be an amorphous blog of NOT DONE, AND OH GOD THE DEADLINES and becomes a set of COOL THINGS I GET TO WRITE NOW.

And the only way to get there is to poke at the work until the cool things manifest themselves, and start getting written.