A New Feeling

I woke up this morning completely rested, at 5:45am. I'm still feeling great, with no crashing or hoping for a nap. I hardly know what to do with myself, since I can't remember feeling this way, not even once, since early morning seminary started the fall of 1984. I've long become used to the negotiations done on my early morning knees, the planning when I can get a catnap, the pointing in my mental calendar to when I might possibly be able to sleep in (possibly being the key, since nothing ever really happens as planned). But since the summer of neuro adventures where my trusty neurologist and I try to figure out my headaches and make them not be strokes or migraines too often, the exhaustion has been a non-stop wall of sludge I wade through each day, where no amount of sleep is ever enough and no matter how early I go to bed and how many naps I squeeze in, I am still just dying of exhaustion and praying to make it at least until the kids fall asleep.

And so it comes as no surprise that my prayer this fast Sunday was for answers, a way to make it better. My desk (and by "desk" I mean the large Costco size folding table in my room where I gather craft and scrapbooking projects to gather dust, papers to file and bills to pay and projects that need doing) is awash in each new week's attempt at simplifying, scheduling, searching and I have come up empty so many times. But I really must finally have reached this phase of "after all you can do", or maybe I was finally just ready to listen. Because, as I sat in church, I thought about nutritional deficiencies and timing of nightly meds and when (if) I eat breakfast and on and on and on. And because I am the queen of biting off more than I can chew, I tried 3 new things this week: move my nightly meds up by one hour, eat breakfast before I am allowed to touch the computer, and take a multivitamin with 100% RDA of iron.

These are not big things. I have not been blessed with the opportunity to sleep for a month in the last 48 hours to compress in at least some of the sleep deprivation I have experienced over the last 26 years. But I feel different. I feel better. I feel like these are changes I can maintain and use as stepping stones to the next level.

Elder D. Todd Christofferson spoke in General Conference last month in a talk titled "Reflections on a Consecrated Life." Many of the things in that talk resonated with me, but the idea that to consecrate my life I need to respect my body, whispered to me that my notions of self-care were not very nurturing and things needed to change. These are small answers, but they are huge because I know I cannot do what is needful when I am exhausted, when I can't see straight, when my weeks are filled with the disturbed vision and speech of "complicated" migraines. From this vantage point, not being tired is nothing short of amazing. A tender mercy.