I love bartending so much. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s lax, it’s lucrative. I think it’s slowly killing me, though. It’s taxing. Exhausting. Mentally and physically. It encourages my bad sleeping habits of staying up all night and sleeping all day. I feel as though I live my life in the dark, wasting the daylight hours away.
I’m afraid I’m going to wake up one day and be in my forties and not know how the fuck I got there or what I did that whole time. I’m so scared of losing my life. I just don’t have energy to live.
For so long, I’ve believed it was my depression ruining my life, but it’s recently dawned on me that the real problem is the way I physically feel. Depression hinders me, make no mistake; I suffer from episodes of random crying, random moments of dread, of thinking it’d be easier to not be alive. I go blank, I’ll feel empty, I won’t feel much of anything. I won’t want to leave my house. I think the real kicker, though, is the fatigue I constantly experience.
I’ve blamed my depression for making my body feel like lead, but upon doing more research, I’ve found that there’s such thing as chronic fatigue syndrome. I experience every single symptom; it’s like someone asked me to fill out a questionnaire, that’s how close to home it hits.
I want to paint, and draw, and take pottery classes, and learn how to sew, and learn how to make jewelry, and I want to exercise, and do yoga, and go for walks, and grow plants. These are things I want so bad, but lack the energy to do. To move my arms, to move my legs. To have to think. To have to move. It makes me want to sob because it sounds so fucking exhausting. I want to do things but I’m so fucking tired all of the time. I’m always in pain. There’s always some part of my body that hurts. My knees, my wrists, my shoulders, my back, my neck. I almost always have a headache. I have no quality of life because I’m in constant pain and constant exhaustion.
Of course there’s no sure-fire remedy for this chronic fatigue syndrome, but there are ways to help. I think one of the biggest life changes I need to make is to get a daytime job. It sucks, because I make such incredible money bartending, and I’m so afraid to let that go because regardless of what job I take on afterward, it’s going to be a significant pay-cut for me. I’m getting to the point though where I feel like the money doesn’t even matter anymore. I need a regular sleep schedule. I need to be awake during daylight hours and asleep during nighttime hours.
Maybe it’ll help. Maybe it won’t.
