Nobody tells you that the hardest part of a long-term illness is not the bad days. It is the ordinary ones. The days when you look fine, the diary is full, and the only person who knows what it costs you is you.
I lived like that for years. My health had stopped me by 2012, and still I planned every week as if I had the energy of someone else. Then I spent the week paying for the plan.
Pacing is the word the clinics use. It sounds like a diet. What it actually means is simpler and harder: you spend the energy you have, not the energy you wish you had.
Here is what I had wrong about it.
I thought pacing meant doing less
It does not. It means doing what fits. On a day with very little in the tank, that might be one phone call and a meal. On a steady day, it might be a full morning of work and an empty afternoon. The amount changes. The honesty does not.
I thought pacing was a feeling I would eventually develop
It is not. It is a question you ask before the day asks anything of you. How is my body? How is my energy? How is my mind? What pace can today hold? Four questions. Two minutes. That is the whole of the PACE Energy Check, and I built it because I needed something quicker than my own denial.
I thought a plan had to be fixed to count
It does not. The PACE Week Planner asks you to choose your capacity for the week first, then no more than three focus tasks that can move between days. If Tuesday collapses, the task moves to Thursday. Nothing is lost except the pretence that you could have known on Sunday what Tuesday would hold.
The resistance to this is rarely about time. It is about identity. Capable people have been praised their whole lives for pushing through. Pacing feels like a demotion. It feels like admitting that the rules everyone else lives by do not fit you.
They do not fit you. That is information, not failure.
I call the alternative NO GraGra. Gra gra is noise, force and looking busy. NO GraGra is no noise, no panic, no pressure, just rhythm. Slow first. Then precise. It is not a slogan for giving up. It is the only way I have found to keep going for fifteen years in work that carries my own name.
If you are reading this on a day when you cannot afford to stop, I am not going to tell you to stop. I am going to ask you to check first. Use the PACE Energy Check. Take the pace it gives you. Then do the one thing that fits.
You will get more done than you think. And you will still be here next week to do the next one.
