There are moments, sometimes days, if you have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, when any level of living together is too much. As a friend said not long ago, you are like a doll with no battery: you seem fine, but the soul is lacking.
Or, as another friend (a doctor) said to me, "Hey, if someone says you look fine, tell the person it's not your face that is sick."
After shifting around the house like the domestic ghost, keeping out of the way as the marvelous lady who runs my home cleans, vacuums, and generally keeps things functioning, I finally decided that survival demanded my own room, my own space, my own stuff.
My old study/session room I used when I was still working is the perfect space in spite of a degree of lack of light. Yesterday I hauled a mattress from a guest room into my study and left it on the floor. It's good enough there. I had to order a replacement for the guest room, of course, but with Amazon riding the ether, that was no problem.
Now it's full of my books, my CPAP machine, my banana pillow, all kinds of odds and ends I particularly like, and it may look crammed, but it's perfect. There is a tiny waiting area with a desk and a bookshelf, and a bathroom complete with shower. There is a small throw rug.
This is not just a "room of one's own", however. It is a tool to eliminate my addiction to watching any ridiculous streaming movie in order to shut my mind up and let me sleep. Because I have back problems if I sleep on my stomach, I had moved to the t.v. room with the dogs to sleep on a couch that prevented me from turning onto my stomach and killing my back. But that caused me to watch literally anything, the worse the better, in order to stop thinking and go to sleep. You wouldn't believe the crap that has lulled my too active mind, even, may the Force help me, Transformers! The parameters for nighty-night viewing include non-stop action, a storyline that makes subtitles irrelevant so that I don't have to wear my glasses, and enough chaos so that I can turn the sound completely off without affecting the anesthesic effect of the so-called plot.
Last night I tried to sleep in my room. One problem is the dogs. They were disconcerted but they are not letting me out of their sight, so there was a lot of moving around, checking back and forth, and cold noses pressed against mine during the night.
Nobody tried to get onto the bed with me, no matter how accessible it was. Two things were noted: one, I need to get a water dish for the dogs and maybe something more than the throw rug for them, and two, I couldn't sleep worth a damn without my visual anesthesia. I wound up in the t.v. room again although I don't know what time that happened.
Addictions are terrible things, no matter if it's hard drugs or cigarettes or Coke or streaming rotten movies. The work to defeat an addiction is a killer. May the Force aid anyone fighting to throw out the mental garbage or the physical torture chamber of an addiction.
By the way. So far, no answer to any of my letters.
