M.E. is a form of chronic fatigue, and an invisible disability which I'e had since I was 13. Not a whole bunch is known about it, and as a result it can really hard to explain to people who don't know about it. So I've decided to try explaining it through compairing living with it to playing the Kim Kardashian game! Which will justify the hours I spent playing the game. Just to clarify, I don't intend to suggest that M.E. means you start spelling everything that should be spelt with a "C" with a "K" instead, and you don't become obsessed with becoming famous or are forced to give free stuff to a women who can clearly afford the stuff you're giving her (No Kim, I don't want to give you a free dress….you have so much MONEY, just buy the stupid dress!), the element of the game I want to focus on how you have a finite amount of energy and comparing that to the symptom of fatigue that people with M.E. have.
Living with M.E. means you need to be constantly aware of how much energy you have, and you need to delegate certain amounts of energy to the different aspects of your life. When I was playing the Kardashian Hollywood game I needed to balance both my fictional (and far more active than real) dating life and my fictional (and again far more active) professional life. If I committed my energy solely to one of those two things, I qouls have either be unfamous (which the game tells you, is literally the worst the thing in the whole world) or alone (which your publisists tells you is the other worst thing).
This is a very simplified way of explaining a problem that people with M.E. face, the need to find a way to find balance in their life with only a limited amount of energy. But it's far more complicated than balancing between dating and professional. You need to be self-analytical, work out how much energy you have then decide how you should spend it, and how much you should dedicate to your education, your romantic life (I laughed while typing that, then got sad. Because I'm alone.), your social life, your hobbies, and then any other aspect of your life, in addition to essential stuff, like eating and not dying.
For me it's a bit easier because I don't have a romantic life and I live in catered accommodation meaning I don't need to cook, and I get fed sort of ok. Another way this differs from the Kardashian game is the cost of getting this balance wrong. On the Kardashian game if you run out of energy you just stay very still for an hour or two and it gets better. If I got the balance wrong in the real world I start to develop unpleasant symptoms the more exhausted I get; for example severe joint pains, nausea or migraines, all of which gets more extreme the more exhausted I become, and recovering from it is very difficult and can easily require a few days of bed rest.
The game also clearly tells you how much energy you have and how much you will lose for undertaking a certain task, real life isn't so helpful. For example, some lectures are easy to attend to, but others are absolutely exhausted and force me to rest for the rest of the day. The closest thing to a guarantee I get is the knowledge that Thursdays includes the near impossible task of 4 straight lecture hours (which I am aware isn't much for a lot of people) which I know is to much for me. often that is all I can do on that day, and it usually means I also need to rest the day before as well. This leads me to, literally, dread Thursdays because I can never tell what state I will be in after it.
Essentially what I'm trying to say, is that the system of managing energy on the Kim Kardashian game (or a similar game), can be seen as a very simplified, less unpleasant version of one aspect of living with M.E. Though I do need to clarify two things now before the end. I've used the word tiring to describe M.E., its more than that, it's pure exhaustion. When I lived out of college, there were days where I was to tired to cook, and there are still days I'm so tired I don't leave my room for anything that's not food or tea or a hug. It is a special type of bizarre, extreme exhaustion that I never understood until I had it. In addition to this, what I've said only applies to one aspect of M.E., this post doesn't approach the issues of having a worse immune system, what it's like to have an invisible disability or many of the other dimensions of M.E.
Basically if you take anything from this, take this. If you're playing the Kardashian game, or any game demanding energy, and you get annoyed when you run out of energy, that's what M.E. is like but in real life.
Share This Article
