I’ve talked about exhaustion going from nuisance to serious. It’s been months since it first became a problem for me. Every day I wake up and I’m not refreshed. My eyelids are heavy, my brain feels tight at the base of my skull, and I am starting to get tired headaches. I never get headaches.
Then there was that little incident right in the middle of the day, when I suddenly got hot, a little nauseous, and rode the edge of vertigo for almost two hours. (Before you ask, I am too young for hot flashes.) Not my finest moment, sitting there at my desk talking to colleagues and pretending nothing is wrong, hoping no one will notice.
I don’t know for sure, but I think I’ve been complaining about exhaustion to my doctors for a year or more, chalking it up to just the usual combination of things that are always wrong for people with multiple conditions.
I can’t function like that, always feeling like I need a nap, nodding off at work. I joke about it with my colleagues, but it’s not a joke anymore. I need to figure out what it is. I’m working on it. I’ve gotten the tests I wanted, screenings for hormone and vitamin levels. I should hear back soon.
This isn’t the major issue, though. I have done my fair share of complicated diagnoses. No, my hang-up is that I would really like to request some extra telework time so I can let my body rest when it needs to and just distribute my work hours over a longer period. No one at my office would care. Most people take regular telework days. But they are government employees and I am a contractor. I am afraid to ask for time to accommodate whatever this is. I am afraid that it will make me look different from other employees, weaker.
I don’t want to be perceived as anything but normal. A contractor is always vulnerable to the vagaries of funding and the whims of the client. If I make myself stand out in ways other than good work, I might end up with a target on my back.
But the longer I feel like this, the more I think I need some kind of accommodation. How do I balance that? And how much do I need? Do I approach my client without knowing what the problem is? Does not knowing make the accommodation less justifiable? Less legitimate? For the past two decades, I have built a medical team of providers who don’t make me feel like I need to justify my symptoms, and I still feel the need to justify sometimes. How am I supposed to do better than that with people I don’t trust as much? I don’t feel I can ask for telework without a reason, and my reason is going to set me apart in a way I don’t want to be.
Honestly, there is no actual foundation for my fears. A client has never actually denied me any accommodation I asked for. No one has ever said anything about the telework I take for doctors’ appointments. Or when I needed to come in late every Tuesday because of therapy. Even so I have been struggling with this – reasonably or unreasonably – for what seems like forever.
Wanting to be normal is making me paranoid, and the exhaustion isn’t helping.