can I buy spoons??

February is a fairly heavily-scheduled month for me.  there's wine-tasting, knitting group, two different stitching groups, an orchid show, bad movie night, and more.  I went into this month feeling pretty good about it.  some of these activities are new to me, some involve new people and places.  My natural tendency is to be a hermit, but I know I need to try harder to be social, thus the full dance card.  And I was doing great ... but then I had trouble sleeping Sunday night, getting maybe four hours of sleep.  Monday night I got about three hours of sleep.  Ditto for Tuesday night.   i was such a zombie on Tuesday that i skipped the knitting group, thinking a quick grocery run and an early night would set me straight.  no such luck.  

i was pretty down on Wednesday from having missed something i planned to do.  I mean, no one was expecting me, and I didn't let anyone down (but myself) by not showing up.  I guess the letdown hit me kind of hard.  It was a reminder that no matter how much I want to do things, get out, be social, be normal, I'm still someone with multiple chronic illnesses, and I don't always have the final say.  

I was confiding to my friend B at lunch today about being nervous with my busy weekend -- plans Friday night, Saturday morning, and most of Sunday! -- but she didn't quite get it.  i'm worried I won't have adequate recovery time, pushing myself too hard too fast too many days in a row.  No, I'm not running marathons or climbing Everest, but being alert and engaged and all that takes spoons, and I'm not in charge of how many i get, or they get spent on a particular day.  I'm meeting an entirely new group of people on Saturday, and that takes a lot of out of me, remembering names and manners and reigning in the snark.  

It makes me mad.  it makes me want to shake my fist and scream (whine?) "it's not fair!"  it makes me want to remember to cherish the days when i DO feel good, all the times i've  spent running from sun-up to sun-down without a care in the world.  it makes me remember that for as much as there is in my control, there is just that much more that is not.