You Cannot Effort Your Way Out Of MECFS

One of the hardest things about navigating my illness—and the recovery process—was learning how to wiggle my way out of my relationship with efforting.

For decades, I'd built an empire on efforting. 

I was a classic overachiever.

An over-doer.

A pusher of boundaries.

I loved the idea that I was limitless.

And if someone told me I couldn’t do something, I’d say, oh yeah? just watch me. I mean, I really thrived on achieving the impossible. It was a rush—a major high for me. Every time I climbed a mountain and reached the top, I’d look around and think, eh… this isn’t that impressive. What else can I do? 

So I climbed higher. And higher, and higher. And I pushed harder and faster. And I ignored my body along the way. I got so good at this process that I eventually became a fairly magnificent robot. 

Then came MECFS. And to my shock and horror, I found that I could not effort my way out of it. And that left me absolutely rattled and empty-handed.

It turned out that efforting, fighting the illness, pushing, and trying to achieve recovery didn’t help—it actually made me much worse. It made me sicker. More PEM. More crashes. Suddenly, everything that came natural to me in problem solving suddenly seemed to be counter productive. And all the skills I had used to navigate the world no longer worked in this new body.

I felt trapped in a body that metaphorically didn’t know how to walk or talk in this new land. I felt like a newborn baby. I was utterly lost. But unwilling to give up, I accepted that in order to recover, I was going to have to learn an entirely new set of tools.

What I want you to know is this:

I thought my identity was lost—but it wasn’t. Because my resilience, my perseverance, my curiosity, and my determination remained intact. All of those qualities were still there. I just had to learn how to use them differently.

The challenge was no longer: How far can I run? How fast can I get there? How high can I climb?

It became: How still can I be? How slowly can I move? How intentional can my life become?

The new work of my life was no longer being a magnificent robot, but an embodied human; it became honoring my own limits and boundaries, instead of priding myself on being limitless. It meant finding meaning and validation outside of achieving and producing, and learning to love myself even when I couldn’t give anything to anyone else.

In a strange way, it became a new mountain to climb. Something I could set my sights on that felt like it's own impossible feat. 

And because it was something I had never done before, I was able to bring the same curiosity and devotion to it that I had to everything else. I could feel that learning how to live this way would stretch me—grow me—in ways I never imagined, and that excited me, even when it all felt so impossibly difficult. 

Now, I know this can sound a little woo-woo, especially when we’re talking about a very real physical illness.But the reality of ME/CFS is this: Physiologically, I could not effort my way out of it. And neither can you. 

Effort is contrary to recovery.