Labour of love

This past week has been crazy. I moved out of Massachusetts and back into my parents' house in New Jersey, part of my car's radiator burst because it didn't like us trying to force it out of the ice hut that had built up around it while I wasn't driving, and my girlfriend officially finished her college career, which ended up quite nicely with us spending a couple lovely days in New Jersey when her flights kept getting cancelled.

Although we kept things pretty low key, I still wound up crashing super hard after she left today. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being fully functional and one being a vegetable, I was at about a two for bits of today.

When I get completely crashed out like that, I feel like my brain can't make the connections that it needs to. Everything takes longer; walking, if I can even get myself to that point, is laborious to the point of needing to rely on walls and other people to keep upright. Talking is more of an interesting display, as I can usually only spurt out several words before my brain cuts off my mouth's ability to keep going. The words are still going in my head, but my lips just won't make the sounds. Sometimes, I turn into a broken record and stammer out the last word a couple times, hoping the rest will follow, but to no avail.

Thanks to Wonderful Girlfriend, who is also known to crash pretty hard and has helped me recognize some of my triggers and how to prevent things from getting worse, noticed that this interesting display of brain-mouth fail often follows extreme hunger. However, when I get that conked out, I can't even sense that I'm hungry.

Luckily, now that I'm home, I don't have to worry about starving to death, since my mother always makes sure that the house is fed. I got up from the couch and got to the dinner table (a feat in and of itself), but facially declared that I wasn't hungry and was mostly confused as to how I was even sitting at the table, let alone with a heap of macaroni casserole in front of me. I didn't yet feel hunger, and even let my mouth try to babble about what I had been watching on TV. When that idea crashed and burned, I tried, slowly but surely, to bring a forkful of food to my lips. It finally reached my mouth, still no hunger, not feeling it... BANG OH MY GOD I HAVEN'T EATEN ALL DAY I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW HUNGRY I AM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Needless to say, I finished dinner with a lot more vigor and even managed to speak coherently about halfway through.

It's super past my bedtime, and this is a propos to nothing, but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has shown me kindness, patience, and/or care as I figure out what to do with all of this. It means so much to me to hear how you're all doing and to know that you're thinking of me. I think I'm just going to take a completely stress-free week, which includes not feeling obligated to be social, but know that I'm still around, I'm thinking of you, too, and I'm going to be so happy to have lots of fun, low key things for us to do together when I work up the energy to be able.