🏳️🌈 Hello lovelies . I deal with mental illness and chronic illnesses. If you need to talk, I am more than willing to sit and listen. Keep smiling you beautiful people, someone cares about you.
A thing about how *I* experience chronic pain: it’s not always easy to quantify when I’m in “routine” pain, esp when it’s dull rather than sharp, but it absolutely *does* affect my functioning.
So much stuff about chronic pain, especially relating to pain scales, talks about relatively lower-level routine pain that “you no longer (actively) notice” as if it then becomes a zero sum game; you no longer notice it, therefore it no longer affects you?
But a lot of the pain I live with daily *is* dull rather than sharp. And quite a lot of it I’ve been living with various kinds of intermittently for most of my life. For example, digestive pain and nausea, dull headache, and ongoing musculoskeletal pain *definitely* do affect me even when I’m not actively noticing it. It eats spoons to do things. It makes me actively *considerably* more fatigued and actively reduces my emotional capacity to process rather than react. It also reduces my executive function *enormously*, and that is *not* great at the best of times.
The best analogy I can give is that it’s like background programmes running on a computer, eating processing power.
Sometimes I’m fine with my lonely existence. I’m used to being alone. I don’t have to constantly mask which is what I do whenever I’m around others. I can lay in bed immobile while watching hours of whatever show I want or listening to music. Other times I loathe it. I see others surrounded by friends. I never experience belonging. Some days I only talk to myself. I see human connection and feel excluded, watching from behind a gate. If I was meant to be lonely like I obviously was meant to be, I wish there wouldn’t be painful reminders from everywhere. I wish I could be lonely in peace.
One thing I don’t think I’ve seen talked about is how often people with certain neurotypes or disabilities have different sleep schedules than “normal” And how that’s natural.
Our ancestors evolved to sleep in shifts and they evolved to sleep for 4-6 hours and then another 3-4 hours a little while later.
Like, there are whole “disorders” and “disabilities” DEFINED by not sleeping when you’re not “supposed” to.
I think people need to stop with the assumption that everyone’s clock runs 7-10. Some people can’t get their body to sleep at that time. Some people CAN, but they need to force themselves and their body doesn’t get the proper rest it needs.
Different sleep schedules is something that should be normalized. And not just for work reasons.
