Running its course.
I admit that I have called in sick on days that I was in fact feeling 100% physically healthy. In most of those cases, however, I have declared those days to be “mental health days,” which I consider something of a necessity since I have still not managed to secure professional help1. The small percentage of sick days that have fallen into the category of “other” are those days when I have taken off work for no other reason than I didn’t want to go to work that day.
Today and yesterday are legit. I’ve finally succumbed to the cold-type illness that seemed to strike down everybody around me while leaving me unscathed, for what seems to have been the entire year so far (at times it seemed like the entire cast and crew of Contraption were fighting off various degrees of the illness; Joe, I believe, didn’t fully recover until after the show had finished). My schedule is, I know, a part of the problem, and it’s kind of a small miracle that my body kept it together as long as it did.
I would like very much to stop feeling guilty for calling in sick for a second day. I have in the past gone back to work at the slightest sign of improvement, determining that the first day off was a more-than-fair accommodation on the part of my employer, and that abusing that generosity for a second day was at the very least a sign of spinelessness and crybaby-ism.
Today I decided that it did nobody any good, least of all me, to hop back into my life at less than 100%…which is not to say that I’m going to wait until I’m sure I’m completely and totally well, so much as to say that I decided it was prudent to give myself an extra day to heal.
The decision feels like rebellion against my own programming. It shouldn’t be that way. It is. That’s kinda sad.
1 I have now made two good-faith attempts to connect with a therapist. One informed me that their organization is designed to help extreme cases; those who are so deeply in crisis that they can barely function at all. The other never called me back, which does nothing to alleviate my feelings of irrelevancy and rejection.
Creative Control 