Grief, ED recovery, Mental Health and all the lovely things that give my Sisyphean rock meaning
It’s been a week of exhaustion, strange half-awake thoughts, and doing life anyway. Somewhere between a musical electrician, a trolley upgrade, and a film I didn’t expect to love, things still happened. Not how I planned, not how I wanted - but I somehow survived and lived anyway.
I tried to restore order to my life after gastritis and during cluster headaches. Instead, I burnt Welsh cakes, broke a suitcase, and nearly lost my sanity. Somewhere between entropy, Biscoff, and questionable decisions, I managed to get back on track - slightly more stable, still chaotic, and fully entering my Welsh nan era.
I didn’t realise I was hurting myself, because it didn’t look like harm. It looked like doing the right thing. Pushing through. Not restricting. Carrying on. But my body felt it. The consequences were real. Recovery, for me, isn’t doing everything. It’s learning when stopping is the kinder choice.
I almost didn’t write this post because I feel like I’m always the person with another problem. But cluster headaches are part of my life for months every year. Hiding them never helped me. Even during relic malfunctions and pain, life still happens - sausage rolls, book towns, and Minecraft houses full of chickens.
This week has been a strange mix of gastritis, scaffolding noise, and small victories. I defeated Optimus Amazon Prime (a mountain of cardboard boxes), accidentally fell into the TikTok illusion dimension, and hugged a loaf of bread. Survival, it turns out, is mostly made of small, ridiculous victories.
For months I thought nothing was happening because I was too scared to move. But writing this made me realise something uncomfortable: Scared Rhio wasn't completely stalling. She kept going while terrified. Maybe recovery isn’t waiting for Urgent Rhio to fix everything. Maybe it’s learning to collapse one wave function at a time.
Day four of my surplus wasn't to be... Again. I had the audacity to take iron to help my anaemia. Iron stops play. Oh the IRON-y
On my son’s birthday, my knee sleeves stopped fitting, and something inside me caught fire. Muscle I worked for felt like betrayal. Recovery stopped being theoretical and started burning. Ambivalence isn’t neutral ground - it’s standing in a doorway, one foot in the flames, afraid to move either way.
Four hours of sleep, a pigeon in my coat, birthday presents in a paper bag, and the BBC cutting away from a gold medal performance. The ice was slippery in more ways than one. Depression didn’t cancel the day - it just made everything louder. But the good bits were still there.
I don’t track because I love control. I track because, at 42, I’m done waiting for “eventually.” My body doesn’t run on hope or slogans. It runs on structure. Scaffolding isn’t glamorous, but neither is pretending I don’t need it. This is about longevity, not perfection.
Absurd Universe 