I just read a post about Cabin Fever, but I didn't want to do a "one-up-manship type of thing" on that post (especially since the Bubbler said her little one wasn't feeling well). There's a thing people do, and that's the old, "Well, if you feel bad maybe if you think about all the people who have things worse than you you won't feel quite as bad."

The thing is, sometimes no matter how bad how many people in the world have things worse than you do, that doesn't always make your own situation less miserable than it is. Most of us know how many awful things so many people have to deal with. Most of know that in the "scheme of life" we're fortunate. We can know all of that stuff, but we can know it and still have to deal with the reallities of whatever it is that's miserable for us at the time.
When I write this I'm not entirely sure that I won't get some people wondering what must be "wrong with me", but I'm not going to try to tell the whole, complicated, legal-case, related story that started with badly handled divorce.
The simple fact is that I have been trapped in a house and only able to get out by walking a good distance since 1993 when I couldn't renew my driver's license after I was left to live in my car while also (and thankfully) being ordered to pick up my children each afternoon and on for every weekend.
The rest of the story is, as I said, long and complicated. What doesn't help is that I have been given NO answers by anyone in the legal system or anyone in from "The System", for that matter. God knows who, outside The System, thinks what.

The point is that I've been walking since then, and when that all started it wasn't as if the mother of three children and the whole thing with a house, pediatricians, schools, activities, etc. etc. meant that I was all that rested in the first place. It was, as I used to say, "a good kind of tired", however, so I didn't mind it. It's just that once a bunch of stuff related to the divorce was added to everything else; and once worries about my children being separated from their sole source of emotional support became a factor), that (and the living-in-the-car thing) were more of a drain (to say the least).

I won't go more into the license thing (it's somewhere among all the stuff I've written somewhere else). And, I won't even go into the walking thing (which I actually recently just wrote about on some blog). All the rest of it aside, the real "Cabin Fever" situation set in exactly five years ago this month when I did a serious leg injury (also wrote about that in that same blog post). That put an end to walking, although right when I was getting to at least kind of walk at last the three-mile round-trip to a nearby convenience store, I did another injury to the other leg (also in that blog post and "wherever else" among stuff I've written).

The point is it was just last Summer when I was able to put finishing touches on teaching the "old" leg to know how to walk without my thinking about AND to continue to build up strength both around the injuries and in muscles that had gotten out of shape from my not doing all the walking I'd done before the first injury.

Now there's the thing with snow and ice, which was bad enough (where I live) before any leg injuries. Whether I can walk somewhere has always been weather dependent. These days (and for the last several months at least) I generally get out only when I walk or when I go out with one family member once on a weekend day and often one evening a week.

This would be rotten enough if I were a sick person or even someone who didn't have a lot of mental and physical energy; but I'm not now and never have been either mentally ill or lacking in physical energy. (Well, in the last several years I've thought of myself as often running on "six of my usual eight cylinders" and as time has gone on, on "four cylinders" and in the most recent of times, sometimes as little as "three cylinders".)

Other than that "cylinder issue", I still have a whole lot more energy than a whole lot of people do have, or would have under similar circumstances.

I'm not the "martyr type" and don't want "the proverbial medal" just because I'm still the same me that i've always been (although tired and in need of a good pedicure, among other things). But, once the warmer days started to become fewer and fewer; and once ice and cold (or rain and snow, or whatever else) showed up this year, any Cabin Fever I've generally managed reasonably well has become less and less manageable.
There is not one second of any day when I'm not acutely aware of, and thankful for, the fact that in that "scheme of life" my "miserable-ness" is less than nothing compared to what so many people in this world have to deal with.

Still...........