Getting Back On The Horse

Tomorrow will mark one month since my last shift at the restaurant. It’s been a relaxing month, but also a bit of a frustrating one. At first I was happy to have the time to relax, then I came down with a flu, and now I’m starting to feel cabin fever. This whole month has been a lot of lying around the house and not doing a whole lot of anything, and after a while that gets boring. The frustrating thing about being down is that I’m not so unwell that I can’t do anything – but when I do things, I get easily overtired. I can go to the bar, but after one beer I start to feel overstimulated. I can go for a walk, but that doesn’t feel especially productive. I can try to write, but after an hour I feel like I just want to lie down.

Last week, I finally got in to see a physiotherapist and then a psychologist to discuss the best way to go about getting back to normal. The physio in particular said some interesting things about how my brain is working. He described it as a car engine that’s worn down and isn’t getting enough gas. It still gets you where you need, but the performance isn’t optimal – when you slam on the gas pedal, it doesn’t reach top speed. He did some tests on me and concluded that while I’m over the worst of things physically, my brain is still a tick slow when it comes to processing, and the extra energy I’m expending is probably tiring me out.

Although he advised me not to dive back into work, in my boredom I’ve begun to putter around with writing a little bit more once again. I’m still not ready to tell any of my editors I can get back to the grind – or tackle this book project in its entirety – but I’ve at least sent out a few stories again. My thinking is that the best way to ramp up to full speed is to start small, with jobs that don’t have specific deadlines or come with a lot of pressure. When the inevitable rejections come back, I can simply file them away in an email folder and forget about them.

It’s productive, but it’s also disorienting. Sometimes hustling as a writer can feel like swimming in the middle of the ocean and searching for land. You know there’s eventually going to be land in almost any direction, but you have no idea where the closest patch of land is – or the best. There might be a tiny island just out of eyesight on one side, but an entire continent a mile in the opposite direction. Firing off stories and pitches for rejection, I’m casting about searching for my identity. Do I make my name in fiction? Sports? Does writing content anonymously for money help get this book published? (Probably not, but it might keep my bank account full until we can.)

None of the doctors I’ve consulted have told me to rush back to work. They say I need to focus on myself and how to get myself in the best place possible to be functional going forward. I agree in theory, but in practice it’s hard. I find myself growing bored and agitated. I don’t have a lot of discipline. I’m not really supposed to be drinking or playing sports, but I want to go out and shoot hoops and muck it up at the bar – just to do something. I’m understanding more and more those scenes in movies where the cancer patient breaks out of the hospital because, damn the doctor, he just wants to have fun again.

But at the same time, I have to find a way to step back and think about how to get better. I want to be able to write and work for a lot of years going forward. I have to figure out a way to throw all my energy into making this book the best book it can possibly be. And I know that actually focusing on things like diet and exercise is what will get me back to normal sooner. But old habits die hard…

On that note, I’m off to see the physio for a follow-up appointment.

-Simon