One of the most frustrating aspects of chronic illness is the dynamic part of dynamic disability. When you find it hard to predict how you will feel on a day-to-day basis, it’s hard to feel consistent or reliable. When you aren’t able to give the same amount each day, it becomes harder to plan to achieve the things you want to achieve. Here are some of my tips for working with the inconsistency of my dynamic disabilities. Your mileage may vary.
Take a Wider View of Your Goals and Projects
This is often the first tip I bring up when someone asks me how I run my blog, edit, and work on my books. I look at deadlines, current workload, and break it down to what I normally can handle. Then I batch up all the days into a week. The daily breakdown sits as an aspiration, but I focus on the weekly goals more than the daily goals. If I have a good day, I might do extra to get ahead. If I have a flare day, I will push things off until I feel better. Occasionally it turns into a bigger like last month where I missed blog posts because of covid, but for most of the time, this system works. If you need to change the lens, you look at your calendar with, pull back further into a month or a quarter. Be aware that if you go too wide, you may feel inclined to procrastinate because you just see the time.
Figure Out The Consequences
This feels especially important when you have a lot of external deadlines and you are not seeing how you can actually meet them all. When we do this, we also want to look at any social or societal expectations. What will have terrible consequences if not met? What will just get brushed off? When you try to look ahead to the consequences of not completing the task, you can figure out which tasks need to be done immediately and which tasks can be pushed back. If you are staring at a school deadline with multiple assignments, do later the assignment for the class that you are doing better in and focus on doing the assignment that will cause you to fail first. When it comes to chores, look at the state of your house. If your place is kinda messy but not a hazard to the inhabitants, you can put the chores lower on the priority list until you have the energy to tackle it or it becomes a higher priority.
Ask for Help
If you are anything like me, this can be a very hard step to take. It is natural to want to do things ourselves when we can. But sometimes the better thing to do is look to a friend or family member and ask them for help. Maybe it’s running an errand for you, maybe it’s proofreading a paper, but whatever you need help with can be helped by enlisting others. It’s often surprising how much people want to help if you just ask.
Give Yourself Grace
You are a flawed human being. I am too. It’s part of this life is that we make mistakes. When that happens, we need to let go of the self-beating thoughts and focus on the knowledge that we did the best we can. We will not do things perfectly and that’s both fine and normal.
Those are my tips for working with the inconsistency of chronic illness. Do you have any ideas of your own? Leave them in the comment below.
