I got my second COVID jab back on Friday morning, and for the first twelve hours afterwards I thought I’d gotten away without major side-effects. I swallowed some aspirin and went back to work, felt good enough to hike home after my day was over. It tuckered me out a little, but only a very little.
“This is not so bad,” I thought. “Much easier than jab one.”
I went to bed early, with big plans for the weekend…and promptly woke up with a high fever at two AM, unable to get back to sleep because everything fucking hurt. Headache, arm, every joint in my body. The whole damn enchilada.
Plans for my weekend were revised, and all expectations curtailed. My partner and I figured we’d take things easy, order breakfast in. I wasn’t in any state to make something myself, and my partner was getting antsy about their second jab on Saturday, given how rough I felt.
Our breakfast arrived and we chowed down, and had immediate regrets. Nothing tasted good, and one thing in particular tasted a little…off.
Which is how the food poisoning began, derailing the handful of plans we’d left in place including my partner’s second shot. They were throwing up. I was trying to hold food down because we only had one bathroom. Everybody was miserable, and the weekend was a wash. We curled up in bed, slipped in and out of consciousness, and chowed down on crackers and lots of water until Sunday night.
The only upside was that the freelance job I was trying to clear off the table over the weekend ended up stalling because the client wasn’t getting back to me with feedback, so the illness didn’t put me anymore behind than I would have been anyway.
All of which has got me thinking about the fragility of processes at the moment, because I was struggling to keep up with all my commitments before I lost a weekend, and getting sick over the two days I can use to “catch up” really threw me off. I’ve dropped a few balls on the writing and publishing front, and the act of writing gets harder to pick up again because the looming weight of undone projects starts every writing stint from a place of dread and pressure to get things done.
I promised myself I wouldn’t start making any serious cuts or reshaping of projects until we hit the “new normal” of December. Last week was the tail end of the truly bad period – overloaded with freelancing projects and deadlines while bedding in the new job – and this week sees my partner and I figuring out a new morning routine for the third time in as many weeks.
Fortunately, things start to settle from here. My partner is wrapping their head around no longer going into the office, and focusing on a big spring-clean of the flat now they’re home full time. Come November, we start on the Brain Jar learning curve, giving them capacity to pick up jobs that currently get done in the spare moments of my evening. And, with luck, my freelance work will be fully set-aside by November 30, leaving me wearing two and a half hats (writer, program manager, brain jar press) rather than four rather large ones.
That will help, I think. If not…well, there’s some really hard choices to be made about what projects to keep and what to set aside.
Until then, I’m pondering options: is it time to write by hand again, just until we get to the festival in May and things start to settle down? Time to do NaNoWriMo, just to push myself to cleave to a process and schedule for a stretch? Time to concede that I’ve made a horrible mistake with this job, and the perks like “being ahead of the mortgage” and “allowing my chronically ill partner to step away from work and heal for a stretch” come with trade-offs I’m really unhappy with?
There’s no easy answers to any of those questions, and my current answer is unlikely to match my answer a few hours later (I was seriously down on the job on Monday night, less so by Tuesday evening; and my answer on NaNoWriMo switches every fifteen minutes).
And in truth, all of them are trying to answer the same question in their own way: how do I rebuild and keep some resilience, instead of rendering my workflow fragile and prone to breaking when I’ve had a bad day at work or launch into a story that doesn’t quite land right.