Sick days

I’m not sick but I’m not well.

What I’d dearly love to do is to take a sick day or two. For a sick day I’d have to phone work. I’d have to sound ill. I’d have to present some kind of medical certificate to prove that I’m ill because, of course, there are only two states of heath – well enough to go to work or so ill you have to go to the doctor.
I do not sound ill. I do not have a cold, my nose and throat are relatively clear, there are other kinds of illness but, for effect, colds really are best. If you were to check you would find that I have an elevated temperature but that’s no biggie, I get a temperature with PMS and headaches. My head kinda hurts but that means nothing. I kinda ache but, again, how do you prove? I am extremely tired despite the stacks of sleep I’ve had over the weekend. I am unusually emotionally fraught. Great, now I just sound depressed.
This is one of the things I hate about the modern world – having to ‘prove’ everything. There’s something wrong, I can feel it, I just can’t prove it. I keep asking why I should need to prove it and then I remember that it all comes back to work. You cannot just have days off. Being there, no matter what, is more important than your relative performance – this seems quite ironic to me as my workplace is obsessed with statistics. Technically, what I do is customer service. I feel ill in a way that is affecting my mood. On two counts I will not be able to do my job properly – I temporarily lack the temperament to work effectively and deal with the fuckwits and I’ll be doing it much slower [thus effecting my stats] as I do not have my usual concentration span. But since I’m not sick enough for a doctor I shall have to go to work. I’m sure this makes someone, somewhere happy.
Alas, I also sound like a complete whiner. For most of history people haven’t been able to just stay home and rest because they don’t feel well [think of the epidemics that might have been saved if they had] they’ve had work at whatever they did come what may. Why should I feel irritated because I can’t do what I think is best for me? Perhaps that’s it – the knowledge that with this, as with so many other things in life, my opinion seems hardly to matter. Actually, it doesn’t matter at all. And I am making mountains.
I could do it but I would be wracked with guilt. My boss would make me feel guilty though they could happily manage without me. Instead of resting justly and to feel better I’d spend the day worried and fretful about wasting my sick days. It would do me no good. So I shall spend about three hours tomorrow feeling ill on public transport, I’ll spend eight hours at work feeling funny, I shall get stressed at nothing, and I will be paranoid that I have made mistakes. I shall save my sick days for when I am really ill and I will become really ill through ignoring feeling ill and pushing myself and my health. Which, of course, is the modern way. People pride themselves on what they can work through, what they can cope with, how they have to be hospitalised to be stopped for want of just nipping it in the bud. I do love the way things work.

I’m going back to being melancholy and queasy.