What happened to August?

Welcome to September I guess??

Guys. I only JUST realized it’s September. That’s where we are mentally. So let’s do this. Read on to find:

• 🤔 A life update

• 💕 A thought I’m loving on being who you are

• 🗳️ A poll (I need help)

• 🔗 Some link love

• 📆 A full recap & links to this past month’s posts

🤔 A life update

Boy oh boy. August was one of the worst flare-ups I’ve had in a long time. A key feature of Long Covid (for those who are interested) is what my Dr calls “THE WALL.”

With Long Covid, we have a certain diminished capacity. Some people think of it as spoons, I think of it as marbles. I have a certain number of marbles. And when I reach the bottom of my marble jar; when I overspend my marbles, I hit THE WALL. A couple of things happen when you hit THE WALL:

1. you will experience a flare-up

2. Once the flare up ends, you are left with a diminshed capacity moving forward. You now have fewer marbles to start with and only through careful pacing and not hitting THE WALL can you build it back up. It’s like a game,(a super fun one). Like, if you don’t overspend your marbles three weeks in a row, you get an extra marble.

The tricky thing is - you never know when you’re going to hit THE WALL, and the flare-up often takes 24-48 hours to hit, so there’s no instant feedback loop. This means sometimes, you can REALLY mess things up by hitting THE WALL and then continuing and hitting THE WALL again.

I’ll tell you what happens if you hit TWO WALLS back to back: August.

At the start of August, let’s say I had 8 marbles for a day. I hit THE WALL by pushing too hard but didn’t notice due to the delay. As a result, I let myself recover a little bit - I knew I’d pushed a little hard - but I underestimated how much my marbles had been reduced. So I overspent AGAIN. And at that point my body just kind of quit.

ZERO MARBLES FOR YOU. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE YOUR MARBLES AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING THEM BACK UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE YOU KNOW HOW TO NOT OVERSPEND.

So I spent most of August in bed. Trying to prove to my body I can be trusted with a little energy.

This isn’t an interesting thought for many of us but I will tell you - nothing will show you the brokenness of the Western system like chronic illness. Because I have been trained to push through WALLS for 40 years. In everything you do: exercise, work, life - we are rewarded for pushing ourselves beyond our capacity.

And our sweet and faithful bodies go with us. Because they trust us so much. They send up flares - trying to let us know it’s too much. But we just call them weak or we get annoyed or irritated, or we just muzzle them.

Oh for a world that teaches pacing as a way of life. Not just for the Long Covid among us, but for all of us.

Our kind Creator designed us for pacing: for rhythms of rest when the sun goes down and our bodies sleep. Our kind Creator designed our bodies to let us know when we have pushed too hard or too much.

Imagine operating within the healthy capacity of your body. Honoring its design. What might that be like?

🗳️ A poll [What month’s newsletter is this?]

I had a mini-crisis when I went to write the subtitle of this email.

Last month I wrote “August newsletter” in the ubtitle. I sent the newsletter on August 1st, but it was things I’d been processing during July. Should it have been called the July newsletter or August? Is this newsletter the September newsletter or the August??? HALP!! VOTE BELOW!

(P.S. This poll won’t let me write the options long enough, so here are your options:

1. This is the August newsletter because the content is from August - even if you send it on Sept 4

2. This is the August newsletter, but you needed to send it Aug 31 to call it that

3. This is the Sept newsletter because you sent it in Sept (regardless of content)

4. This is the Sept newsletter because that’s the month we’re going into

💕 A thought I’m loving [on being who you are]

“I would rather be waht God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of;

for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God,

Is the dearest, grandest and most preciuos thing in all thinking.”

• George MacDonald

🔗 Some link love

• A great article on Adult Friendship

• An activity I want to do with my nieces

• A book with content that I wish more women had been taught

• A reminder of some things worth getting hopeful about

• Song of August (I rewatched Twister so this classic weaseled its way back on my playlist)

• A cat dancing for ya

📆 What you missed in August

Below are some links to what I’ve shared this past month! (Please note that some of my messier thoughts and musings are behind a paywall. You can read more about why I do that here, and feel free to upgrade your subscription to access them.)

• Prioritizing Something Different - kind of a part-two of the post below

• Gospel-Centered vs. Jesus-Centered - an argument for acknowledging these things are different

• Take it Back - Some thoughts on the wounded reclaiming the church

• Thoughts on Disabilities, bodies, and some link love - last month’s newsletter