When You Have To Triage Your Own Self-Care

My fibro and bi-polar have been pretty amped up lately, so I’ve had to go back to the very beginning and write down a list of all the things I know I need to do to take care of myself during times like these.

You would think-or at least I would-that I should remember what to do after all of these years, but one effect of chronic pain and illness is that you periodically get amnesia when it comes to things like this. Once the pain, or the anxiety, or the mania get to a certain point on The Awful Scale, they take up all of the space in your mind and body, and you kind of lose access to your higher brain functions, where these kind of self-care skills live.

Serendipitously (what a great word!), I recently saw on a friend’s Facebook page a link to a post called “Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up“. It’s another list of basic self-care items, and the author has turned it into a PDF that you can print out.

While we’re on the subject of printouts, Lizzie of The Pillow Fort has put together a customizable document called “Why Don’t You Just Know How To Help Me?” that you can share with the people around you so they know what to do when you find yourself in a bad place.

And don’t forget to say hi in the comments if you’d like to be entered into the raffle to win one of 5 Clean Bottles.