42.5

This self portrait belongs to my series on living with Chronic Fatigue; Enchanted Sleep. One common experience most people with CFS (and also fibromyalgia) is what's known as "brain fog." Personally, I tend to experience it worst when I'm already extra tired and running on fumes. It's extremely frustrating, it's like your brain is slowly just shutting down. My spelling is fairly hit-or-miss anyway (thank heaven for spell checking!) but once I'm brain fogged, all bets are off. I lose my ability to spell easy words, or sometimes even string words together in a coherent way. It's very similar to how my brain feels if I have the flu, very fuzzy and foggy, where the simplest things feel insurmountable and everything becomes emotionally amplified. The longer I push myself and can't rest, the worse it gets. Luckily, in most cases it goes away once I'm able to get enough rest.

Since this is such a prevalent symptom for the CFS sufferers, I wanted to visually express what it feels like. MANY thanks to Geoff for helping me wrangle the dry ice for this photo! I really couldn't have done it without him :)