I know, I know. My topics seem to revolve around my illness a lot but at the moment it’s one of the biggest factors in my life that dictates how I go about my everyday life. Since writing about it helps and I like sharing my experience, I thought I would take today to talk about my chronic illness affects my ability to blog. Not just to help cope with it, but to also try and better my day-to-day life in whatever way is best for me.
I once again had a flair up with my Chron’s, so for about two weeks, I had to take some time off from writing and working on my blog posts to just rest and get better. I always feel incredibly guilty when I have to take long breaks like that. I live on disability so otherwise, I don’t have very much to do day-to-day. Doing nothing often makes me feel lazy or worthless but I have to keep reminding myself that I’m disabled for a reason and that my main priority is to take care of myself in the best way that I can. So something I need to work on more is being kinder to myself when the low points of my illness creep up.
One thing that I can start doing to get better at this is working out some tips for working with a disability. Hopefully, these can apply to you as well, and feel free to tweak them to your needs as we all are different and have different requirements for feeling at our best.
Make A Schedule Based On Your Body Clock
Before I would try to stick to a schedule of waking up early so that I would have plenty of time to get things done in one day, but often found that to be a struggle, and to be honest I was working against my natural clock. I have to remember that I can’t push myself because once I start doing that, I start to feel worse and that’s one of the stressors that trigger my bad health days. So instead, I’m going to see what time of the day I wake up naturally and make that my starting point.
From there I can determine my needs, like what kind of morning routine suits me best because while there are some good ones out there, I often find them to be too ambitious and I need something a little more laid back.
Make A Loose Upload Schedule
It’s not bad to make an upload schedule just so that my work is organized, but there’s no need to be strict with it. For example, on Mondays, I post my Morg By The Week posts (like what you are reading right now), and on Fridays, I like to post review-type articles. I’ve organized myself enough to where I know when to post what, but am free to skip a post if I have had a bad health week and am unable to get my writing done. Then when I do get it done, I just schedule it to go up on the following day where that type of post goes up.
Be Patient With Myself
There’s no doubt that I push myself too hard and most of the time it takes me a while to even realize I’m doing it. When I feel too bad to do anything at all I’m often too hard on myself about it and guilt-trip myself for being lazy (even though I’m really not lazy). I really need to work on being kinder to myself in those moments and need to recognize that if I need rest then I should give it to myself instead of forcing myself to get things done. We all have different needs and capabilities, so it’s important to just be patient with my body and listen to what it’s trying to tell me. There’s no rush to healing and resting, and my work can get done another day if need be.
Overall these tips are really just “take care of yourself” when you really boil them down. That’s probably the most important thing I can get across with this post. We are all different and all have different needs, especially for those of us that are disabled. We need to make sure that we take care of our needs with whatever that may be. If we don’t take care of our health first everything else we try to do may become impossible. Sometimes our worst enemy can also be ourselves. Once we have a good day we try to take advantage of that and do our best to get as much done as we possibly can. However, that often leads to us overdoing it and just making ourselves feel worse again. Even when we are in good health we need to be conscious of our limits and still work within those to ensure a longer good health streak.
Moving forward I will definitely be trying to work these tips into my daily life and working on being more mindful of myself. I hope this was helpful or the least bit relatable, it was good to just get these thoughts out. Thank you for reading this week’s Morg By The Week, I’ll see you next time, Cheers!
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