Three Days Out of Every Fortnight

She knows about four hours before, and the knowing is almost the worst part.

There is a smell that is not there. There is a word she cannot find, a common one, and she stands in the kitchen looking for it. There is a patch at the edge of what she can see that shimmers slightly, like heat off a road.

Then she starts canceling.

Three days. Sometimes two, occasionally four, but three is the honest average, and it comes round roughly every fortnight, and it has been doing that for six years.

The first day is the one nobody outside the house has ever seen. Curtains. A bucket by the bed, some of the time. The particular fact of pain that has a pulse to it, that is worse when she moves her eyes, so she does not move her eyes.

The second day is fog. She can get up. She cannot be trusted with anything numerical.

The third day is the strange one, the flat clear one, where she is fine and hollow and behind on everything.

And here is the thing she has never said to anybody, because it sounds like self pity and she cannot stand self pity.

She has stopped agreeing to things.

Not consciously. She did not sit down one evening and decide to have a smaller life. It happened one declined invitation at a time, one job she did not go for, one weekend away she found a reason not to book, because six days a month is a lot of days to gamble and she has been caught out in public before and she will not do that again.

That is you, and the arrangement is sensible, and it is not the shape of your life.

What this page is not doing

Three things, and I would rather say them at the top than have you waiting for them.

I am not going to suggest a trigger. You have kept the diary. You have done the food, the sleep, the screens, the hormones, the weather, and you have had the conversation where somebody who does not get them asks whether you have tried drinking more water. I am not adding to that pile. This rests on Scripture in Matthew 8:17, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

I am not telling you to leave your neurologist or your medication or anything else on that list. Anybody who tells you that faith and treatment are rivals has understood neither, and it is not what this site is for.

And I am not going to tell you this would be gone by now if you believed harder. There is no verse that prices healing by intensity of faith, and if there were, this whole book would be about the strong.

You are not carrying this because your faith was insufficient. Scripture says my grace is sufficient for thee, 2 Corinthians 12:9, and the sufficiency sits on His side of the sentence and never on yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a dark room on a first day.

The verse is about carrying, and the word is physical

There is a line in Matthew that quotes Isaiah, and the verb in it is worth slowing down over.

Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.Matthew 8:17

Took. Bare. Both of them are lifting words. They are what you do with a load: you get under it and you take the weight off somebody.

Matthew puts that sentence at the end of an evening of healing, which means he is not using it as a metaphor for something spiritual and internal. He has just watched it happen to bodies in a street, and he reaches for Isaiah to say what he has seen.

And the tense matters. He took. It is done, in the past, by Him, and there is no clause anywhere attaching it to how well the sick person managed their attitude.

Notice also what it does not say. It does not say He removed every infirmity from every person immediately. Matthew is a careful writer and he did not overclaim, and the same Bible that carries this verse carries Paul with something that stayed. Both are in there and neither cancels the other.

You are not carrying this alone, whatever the fortnight does. Scripture says himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses, Matthew 8:17, and bare is a load-bearing word rather than a comforting one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the difference between a verse read and a weight actually lifted.

The smaller life is the part I would touch first

Six years of losing six days a month is a real loss, and I am not going to be brisk about it.

But the thing that has cost you most is not the six days. It is the twenty four.

Because the declining is not confined to the bad days. You decline on the good days, in advance, about a future day you cannot see, and you have been doing it so gradually that you have never once seen it as a decision. Scripture already said it in Matthew 8:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

The job you did not apply for. The weekend that never got booked. The friend you stopped suggesting things to, because you canceled twice and could not bear to do it a third time.

That is the migraine taking days it never actually took.

I am not telling you to be reckless. There are real reasons to keep some room. But there is a difference between planning around a condition and handing it the diary, and somewhere in the last six years you handed it the diary.

You are not required to lose the good days too. Scripture says this is the day which the Lord hath made, Psalm 118:24, and it is said about a day rather than about a fortnight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a person back a Saturday she had already written off.

The public thing

There is a specific fear underneath a lot of it, and it deserves naming because you have never said it out loud. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Matthew 8:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

It is not the pain. You can do the pain; you have done it a hundred and fifty times. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Matthew 8:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

It is being caught out in front of people. It is the aura arriving in a meeting, or on a train, or at somebody's wedding, and having to explain, and the look, and the particular horror of somebody being kind about it in public.

That fear is doing more scheduling than the migraines are.

And it is worth saying plainly: nobody at that wedding thinks less of you. The story you are running about how it looks is a story, and it has never once been checked, and it has quietly removed six years of things you would have enjoyed.

You are not a burden in a room. Scripture says God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, 2 Timothy 1:7, and a sound mind is exactly what a story that has never been checked is not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a dread down to its actual size.