Oct 15 2008
Lost in Exhaustion
After my intense stint of working for Kitya I ended up working in the film industry for one season. I assisted a friend of mine in the accounts department. The problem was that it didn’t matter how much sleep I got I kept becoming completely exhausted by 3pm each afternoon. I used to make my own oat, fruit and nut bars to take into work and I would just devour one after the other. I could not stop eating and I couldn’t focus on my work. For the life of me I did not know what was wrong.
A good nights sleep was not a common thing for me at the best of times. Semi-insomniac would be the word. But this perpetual exhaustion was just ridiculous. I found it hard to concentrate on what people were saying to me. I felt like I had the brain of an 80 year old. I just couldn’t hack it.
After the end of season I left and became a full time belly dance teacher. I taught one class a day and earned enough money to get me by each month. All I had to do was save up my energy each day to pull off a good hour and a half class. It worked well. Unfortunately the downside was the drastic drop in students during winter. Winter in Cape Town is very rainy, a good time to hibernate! And everyone did. During this time I got into a relationship. I found myself becoming more and more irrational, not remembering what I had said and constantly contradicting myself. I remember when I stayed at my partners house I would end up having a panic attack because the sheets weren’t cotton and my skin became uncomfortably sensitive. It was ridiculous!
By the next winter I felt stuck in a rut and decided to go and visit my mother overseas and work in Europe for a while. It was great to have a change of scenery, I have always found travel very regenerating. I ended up staying with a very kind friend in London and got a job as a secretary for a group of Osteopaths. Again my energy levels were down, this time worse than ever, we worked in a building with no windows. Lack of light was clearly a bad thing for me. I remember sleeping 12 hours a night in UK as a kid, from lack of sunlight. I couldn’t concentrate on what people were saying to me and kept messing up badly with the computer, even though it was very straight forward. I got more and more stressed, ending up having panic attacks on the way to work each day. I new I would get fired, so I found an au-pair job with an English family in the South of France.
It was so beautiful there, but things just got worse. I had to try and cover up my exhaustion, which led to neurosis and more panic attacks. I could hardly sleep and my body was rigid with aches and pains. I could only think of food all the time. I had not eaten unhealthily at all, no meat, wheat, sugar or dairy, yet I was blowing up like a balloon. I couldn’t fit into my clothes anymore and I was just eating veggies and salads. I could not figure out what was going on. I just wanted to burst into tears and say “can someone please tell me what is wrong with me!”.
The last straw was waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to move my body for a minute. I had such a huge panic attack. I phoned my friends in UK and SA and arranged to come home where I had a better chance of getting help.
And I did……..
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