DTNV

I'm lying in a puddle on the bathroom floor when an incessant knocking on the front door wakes me up.

All right, maybe it's not a literal puddle, but my shirt and shorts are soaked through. My brain feels like Jello left in the sun too long, and every single part of my body is aching. I have no idea what time it is or even if it's still Thursday night. I'm shaking and not completely sure if I'm going to be able to sit up, but the knocking at the goddamn door is relentless. My apartment is tiny, but dragging myself to the front door is a nearly Sisyphean task.

"Holy shit." I've barely opened the door and the friend on the other side of it is already nearly shouting. "What the fuck happened to you!?" And then, some what quieter (which is scarier) "Do you need to go to the hospital?"

I can only lean up against the doorjamb and fight back tears.

***

A few years ago, my younger brother got a sort of strange birthday gift. 

I was, for whatever reason, home for his birthday that year.We all got him stuff to do with ropework. It's a little less surprising, I suppose, when you consider that he's a rock climber and general outdoorsman, but it was still an odd set of birthday gifts. 

The reason I remember the gifts is less because of their oddity and more because of a conversation I had at the time. I Skyping with Krista and my younger brother popped into frame to say hello. When they got to talking about his birthday gifts and he excitedly showed her the book she couldn't stop laughing. 

"You are so exactly like your sister." She finally managed to choke out.

"What do you mean?"

"You both immerse yourself in something completely, master it, and then move on to some other hobby. And it's never anything, well, normal."

My younger brother and I both looked bemused. She just kept laughing.

***

I have a low threshold for obsession. 

I know. Yes. Duh. You, Kelly, have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Of course you have a low threshold for obsession. 

I have a low threshold for obsession and a love for . . . the esoteric. I have a slight tendency to get deeply involved with, say, the Smiths? BAMF U.S. Presidents? Early 20th Century ACLU lawyers? It doesn't matter. I frequently get deeply involved in a subject, learn as much as I can about it, and then move on to the next topic. Whether it's a function of natural curiosity or of OCD or of whatever doesn't concern me overmuch. I like being curious and I like learning things, so who cares what the motivation is? 

My latest, um, hobby has been frequency analysis. By hand. 

It started a few months ago when someone suggested Simon Singh's The Code Book to me. He gets into frequency analysis in the beginning chapters and, well, it sort of struck me. I like puzzles and I wanted to see if I could figure out some simple ciphers. 

I wish I could describe what deciphering my first code was like. It was like getting kissed for the first time by a boy you really like. It was like meeting your favorite author. It was like watching the sun rise over Tiger Leaping Gorge. 

It was indescribable. 

Frequency analysis is really hard for me. I don't have a brain for patterns, and fine detail work has never been my thing. 

But I. Love. It. 

I love it. Singh's book is sitting relatively abandoned on my Kindle while I'm watching online courses on cryptography. I started work on a small cipher last week at a Superbowl party. I've been working on frequency analysis on the same letter for a week now, and while I can't quite seem to get it I can't stop trying. It's a silly hobby, a weird thing to get hung up on, especially because the letter is likely to be either some strange, complex nerd shibboleth that I won't understand or a historical document deciphered hundreds of years ago.

It is, empirically, a weird hobby. 

But, weirdness aside, it just knocks me out. I like love  am mildly obsessed with frequency analysis because I'm so bad at it (this is an unusual thing for me). It requires all of my concentration and, like when I go for a run, it takes me completely out of myself. There are no other Kellys in my head, there's no stress about work or what I've had to eat in the course of the day or my love life, just a string of letters that mean something, damn it. 

I've got to know what they mean.

***

I haven't been taking care of myself. 

When you are as health-conscientious as I am, not taking care of yourself doesn't just mean not getting enough sleep. It means not getting enough sleep or exercise or eating as well as you normally do or seeing your friends or doing any of the things you're supposed to do. 

During times like this it's usually my mental health that goes straight to hell. My more minor OCD symptoms flare up. Anxiety spikes. Depression settles in. 

I'm not taking care of myself because there's this huge project that ended up on my lap. It's absorbing and exceedingly difficult and due on a short time line. In conjunction with my normal volunteering, work, personal writing, and friends, it's too much. I should say no, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Because it's interesting. And vital. It's a game-changing, world-saving project. 

Of course I'm going to end up involved in it. 

I work too hard and too long on it. I become obsessed with it and add the hours that I work on it to the hours I spend deciphering whatever I can get my hands and add those hours on top of the work them I'm already doing on because I need the challenge. I need to push myself because I've been sorely lacking in challenges lately. But the tiny, rational part of my brain recognizes that maybe this time it's a little bit too much. I'm not even sleeping my normal (paltry) four hours a night, I'm struggling to eat 1,200 calories a day because I don't want to take time away from my projects to cook, and I'm running primarily on sugar-free Redbull and coffee (at one point in my life this would have been coffee and nicotine so, I suppose, progress). Thankfully, by Wednesday the project should be wrapped.

I've got to finish. 

***

I don't recall most of Thursday. 

I have a pretty normal immune system. I mean, it's not great. It's not terrible, either. I get a few serious colds every year. A sinus infection or two. I have intense allergies to anything soft and adorable, but my immune system does its part. 

I spent the entirety of Thursday lying on the bathroom floor, alternately sweating so much I went through three pairs of pajamas during the course of the day or shivering so badly my teeth were actually chattering.

Have you ever felt your teeth chatter? I have a low threshold for cold (yet I live in the real-life equivalent to Winterfell) so it happens to me probably about once a week during this time of year. It is an unpleasant experience in the best conditions, and these are far from the best. 

I've been pretty (inconveniently) sick during the course of my lifetime. I had something resembling cholera on an overnight train in China. While traveling in Peru I threw up for what felt like 36 hours straight. The day after I turned into my graduate thesis I developed a cold that would turn into bronchitis. 

I have never been sick like this. 

This was couldn't handle drinking water sick. This was dizziness and fatigue and a migraine so bad moving anything hurt. This was an utter refusal to get up off the bathroom floor all day because I couldn't decide if I'd be able to make it the twenty-one steps to my bed without passing out. This was a half a degree temperature away from hospitalization. 

I don't recall most of Thursday. 

What I do recall was stumbling to the door at some time after six in a fug of sweat and germs and godonlyknows to have Gatorade and aspirin and chicken pho broth shoved down my throat. To have my temperature taken and get tucked into bed. To have the last thing I heard before the door clicked shut stick in my exhausted, feverish mind: "Girl, you've gotta start taking better care of yourself." 

When I woke up in sixteen hours later to a broken fever and a body feeling decidedly less volatile than it has in the previous seven days (of course, Holly Hindsight could see that I'd been getting progressively sicker for weeks), I realized that my cryptography notes and project details had been placed in a drawer safely out of sight. 

I left them there. 

For the time being, at least.

I've got to start taking care of myself.