Spoons from Hoxne Hoard. Mike Peel CC-BY-SA-4.0

It’s four years since I last wrote this blog. A lot has happened in those four years and I wanted to get back to blog writing. But one of those things was serious illness* last year – serious to me, in that it’s chronic, and odds-on permanent, even if it will probably not kill me. So it’s in some ways a fresh start, and in some ways not.

Why not start a new blog then? Why continue this, which is old, and in blogging terms, discarded. There is the illness and that’s reason enough. Everything I do is stripped to bare essentials. My energy is like a sand timer, and it runs out, quickly. I must think about the basics, how much will a shower cost, have I enough for a bath, to hang out laundry. Setting up a new blog, deciding, designing, that carries a cost. If I do this, then I do not do that. Try to do too much, and my legs fold under me, I end up on the ground. On my bedroom floor. In a bus queue. It’s not a choice.

There is a reason, another reason why I am choosing not to pay this cost and instead just to pick up and continue. And this is that although I might look back a little embarrassed about what I’ve said once, or something I was trying out I think now doesn’t work or fit, it’s still part of who I am and what I did and what I do.

Mostly I think I shall be writing about working to complete the PhD. The doubts and questions I have and what happens on the way. If all goes to plan – hah! life laughs at plans! – I shall be formally re-enrolling to finish writing up come April. So the next few weeks I will be looking at what accommodations I need, what’s realistic, figuring out what a working day can be and what it cannot. I’ve been on a trajectory of recovery, a slow getting-better, and maybe I will be one of the people – the specialist said 1 in 3 – that this will go away and that has to be a factor. So, the blog is back, and I am too.

*This. https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/about/index.html