Well it’s been a rough few weeks.

Again.

This year feels like it has been pretty brutal quite honestly. Sometimes adulting is really hard.

The combination of the work restructure, and the uncertainty about my job, some pretty awful press coverage for months and months and months on end, plus the adoption process, has all been very stressful and fairly draining.

For weeks now I’ve been feeling tired, worn-out, and finding it increasingly hard to engage with things, especially at work.

A couple of weeks ago, we had an awful week-long team building workshop where we were supposed to bond as a new team and try to get excited about our new roles and new teams, but honestly, I’m just not excited about any of it. I’m glad I have a job and can continue to pay my mortgage and my bills, but frankly I’m not at all excited at this point – I’m tired and fed up and exhausted, so it’s a massive struggle to drum up any excitement and feign being happy about it all at this point. I was all over the place – feeling cross and grumpy, then weepy and emotional, and I realised I was just so damn tired that I’ve basically lost the ability to be rational anymore.

Last week, I dragged myself through Monday and Tuesday at work, but by Wednesday, I woke up utterly shattered, and hauled myself into work, but realised after half an hour I was so exhausted I literally couldn’t think straight. I felt really vague, and unable to form basic thoughts, and gave up and went home by about 10.30am.

I lay on the couch all day, feeling too tired to move or think, and also feeling really, really pathetic.

I am a grown woman, I am 37 years old, I don’t have kids, and I work a standard 40-hour week. I’m not a lawyer or doctor working 100+ hours, I don’t do overtime, I usually work 9-5, Monday to Friday, and I felt totally baffled at why I was just so damn exhausted by a fairly mundane work schedule.

I lay on the couch, feeling so tired I wanted to cry, barely able to form coherent thoughts, and felt really pathetic for not being able to cope with a perfectly normal amount of work. I know the stress of the restructure has left most of my colleagues feeling run down and tired, but I felt so totally pathetic, like such a baby, not coping with these basic adult things.

But then, on Wednesday night, my GP rang with my blood test results, to inform me that my B12 levels have dropped way below normal and I need to come in asap to start injections again. (I had been told a couple of years ago that I have very low B12, and had a load of injections at the time to bulk up my blood levels, and they’ve been monitoring it and doing regular tests every few months ever since.)

So after my GP rang, I looked it up on the NHS website, and realised that the main symptoms are extreme fatigue, low mood or moodiness, and impaired cognitive function/fuzzy thinking.

It was such a HUGE relief to know I wasn’t going crazy or being really pathetic – turns out my total and complete exhaustion and inability to think straight was all because of my inability to absorb B12 from my food. Simples. I crawled off to bed at 7.30pm happy in the knowledge that there was a perfectly rational explanation for it all.

I had a couple of days off work, doing literally nothing but laying around, which helped a bit, and I’m still fairly wiped out, but now have an appointment to go back in and sort it all out, so once they bulk-load me with B12 again I should be back to my usual bouncy self in no time!