My Life Drops Away : 2001 - 2003

Despite these symptoms, I was determined to live my life, doing more than I should, and then paying for it later with a full-blown collapse that could last a few days, maybe a week.
At that time, I was leader of a local homeschool support group, planning field trips, running meetings, taking and making phone calls, and writing a quarterly newsletter with Alan. I was very involved in my church at that time, up to my ears in different departments, at every service every week, and putting together its monthly newsletter with Alan.
We were both running our website, Ncubator.com, writing articles, in touch with our writers, putting up a new issue every week, running a forum there, and a forum on another website for a friend. I wrote book reviews. And I was homeschooling our five kids.
I had a hole in my head, no?
But I loved this stuff so much. My life was full of things I got great satisfaction from, and everything seemed to be just growing and expanding. I COULDN'T just give it all up.
Could I?
One day, I was frying some eggs and as I stood there at the stove, this thought came into my head. "You've developed a real pattern of doing too much, and then collapsing. And then when you can get up again, you start doing again." Yes, this was certainly true. Then, there came a question. "What if one of these times, you can't get up again?"
That stopped my world. I didn't know the answer to that. It had not occured to me before that things could get worse. But ... what if they could? What if they did? What if I never got up again?
So I had to make some hard decisions. And still, it took me awhile to act on those decisions.
This was in the spring of 2001. I dropped the homeschool group. That was hard. But, okay, it was one thing off the list.
In the fall of that year, I took a deep breath and dropped everything at my church. Made myself stay in bed, the days when I was really too ill to go to church. Before, I'd gotten up, gritted my teeth, hung onto my hat, and gone anyway. Then I'd spend the next three days on the couch trying to recover.
Second thing off the list.
Dropping Ncubator took longer. I rationalized that this was something I did at home, and could do when I was up to it. Nicely ignoring the fact that I just plain was NOT up to it, or anything else. I wrote my last article in 2001, but continued editing and posting our writers' articles. Continued moderating two forums.
I left my friends' forum in the fall of 2002, and still focusing on my own site. A stupid move (or lack of a move) but, if I let go of Ncubator, that would have been the last piece of my life outside of my home, gone. I wasn't ready to face this.
But in the fall of 2003, I finally threw in the towel. I was just too sick, and life was more than I could handle. And off I went to bed.

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