Useless

I had one of those ‘I am useless days today.’ Normally I’m pretty happy with what I manage to accomplish and try to take a strengths based approach to my life (looking at my skills and focusing on what I have achieved, rather than focusing on what I can’t.)

Every so often, though I have a useless day.

They always start out the same. I have one simple task to do, usually something that is going to be a little difficult for my joints, but is still totally doable. In this case, I had to make up the spare bed for my friend who’s coming to stay.

So, I make the bed. It’s a little bit of a struggle, but I do it and I’m so excited that I have accomplished something “difficult” that I’m like ‘yeah! I can totally do anything! I’m going to now change my bed and clean the bathroom and vacuum all the floors.’

I know what you’re thinking – that’s probably like just a normal weekend for most people, but when even one of these tasks causes you pain, this is a marathon.

I got as far as taking all the bedding off my bed - at which point, my arms hurt too much to pick the bedding up again. Basically at that point my solution to the problem was to just stand there in the middle of the pile of bedding feeling sorry of myself. Fortunately, this turned out to be a solution in itself. After a while, my Dad came to check on me, saw the sorry state I was in and decided to make my bed for me.

Now, the sensible thing to do at this point would have been to give up on the idea of vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom, but no, I continued on with my plan. The bathroom turned out to not really need cleaning, as it had been done a couple of days before, it was more just a case of tidying up, so I moved on to vacuuming.

The sensible thing to do would have been to pick out the rubbish on my floor before trying to vacuum, but I was pretty tired and felt like cutting corners.

I managed to vacuum up some receipts, a plastic bag and a pair of stockings I’d left on the floor. All of these were easy to retrieve, as they got stuck, but while “retrieving” them, I managed to vacuum up an ornament off my shelf. I was pretty upset about this, as it was something I’d bought at the Katherine Mansfield house when I first visited it, so I was pretty keen to get it back. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to open the vacuum. My solution was to just press every button on it, which achieved NOTHING. At this point I decided to give and put the vacuum away. Of course at this moment, it decides to not only open, but the top completely came off. More worryingly, a small piece fell out and none of it would go back together.

I could totally NOT do anything. I decided to stick to my strengths and spent the rest of the evening watching TV and eating chocolate while my day fixed the vacuum.

Little Miss Autoimmune