Month: January 2022

So, this week has been a bit of a slog, to be honest. I’m really struggling with the reduced energy resources I have to work with these days. I started off most mornings feeling more or less decent, and made some solid progress on my to-do list, including a lot of niggling tasks that were very satisfying to finally get done… but by lunchtime I feel like lying down, and then I don’t know whether it is just more tiredness, or too much time staring at my phone while lying down (mostly reading! but still…), or if that’s just going to be the pattern of my “morning” sickness (worse in the afternoons/evenings), but the day just sort of never picks back up from there. I continue feeling crappy and mostly don’t get back up off the sofa for any significant amounts of time until finally it seems like an okay time to go to bed. Sigh. I’m finding this pattern to be quite wearing on my psyche – the lack of that feeling of satisfaction that comes of having done a “good” number of things in my day on top of constantly feeling just sort of sub-par really weighs on me more than I would have expected. Hm. Will monitor that, I suppose.

Continue reading “Sunday summary: Still exhausted… but some good times too” →

It’s unclear whether the dominant factor here is jet lag or first trimester fatigue, but either way, somewhere on the scale between tired and completely exhausted seems to be my default setting these days. On days when I’m just peaceably working from home, mostly on my own schedule, this feels highly manageable if slightly unpleasant, but on days when I’m working in person, I find myself wondering how on earth people with full-time in-person jobs handle the first trimester of pregnancy… to say nothing of people whose jobs are inherently physically taxing!

Continue reading “Sunday summary: Exhausted but happy” →

I’m back in Italy. Not that Italy is the real world, but ever since I left for college, I’ve seen my parents’ home/my childhood home as a restful idyll where the woods around us and my parents’ comfortingly familiar presence provide a buffer from the outside world and all of its stressful demands.

Now I’m back in Italy, in my usual fog of post-overnight flight + jet lag confusion. Maximally groggy and grumpy. There’s no way around it – I hate the first few days back in Europe after a trip home, because the jet lag sucks (makes it hard to fall asleep and even harder to wake up in the morning, which the opposite of my preferred sleep schedule) and I have still not found any sort of trick that allows me to feel well-rested any sooner than about a week after the trip. Blargh.

Continue reading “Back to the real world” →

I’m cheating a bit here, but this always happens towards the end of a trip home: a sense of urgency grabs hold as the last few days of my countdown approach, and the harder I try to cling to each moment remaining, the faster they seem to slip away from me. All my noble goals (exercising, writing here, organizing things) fall by the wayside, and all I want to do is soak in my time at home, but I often end up rattling around in a decidedly unsettled manner that makes the days feel blurry and strange.

Continue reading “Days 13-17: A blur” →