I have a number of texts on my phone waiting for a response. Even more emails in my ‘flagged’ compartment waiting to be read/responded to. A few messages on, or in relation to, my blogs which I want or need to reply to. Some Facebook messages which have gone unanswered and fallen off the radar, and a few other messages on my phone or laptop which are floating in the back of my mind and I know need a response.

On top of that, I have a mental list of emails which need sending, meetings which need organising, people who I need to speak to, and forms I need to fill in. I have events to plan, my diary to attend to, the bathroom to clean, and boxes of uni stuff to sort. I am on top of my washing, which is a first.

There have been a number of difficult days recently, and I’m struggling to pull my thoughts together well enough to respond to things properly, so they get left. The lethal combination of Mum’s illness, a looming exam, and the change of living at home compared to living at uni, has lead to a few too many sleepless nights and anxious moments – I’m exhausted.

I feel like I’ve been buried in a hole, and every time I try to catch up, life moves on. Life is moving too fast for me and I can’t keep up the pace. As the days have gone on, more things have slipped: an email response here, a text there, a phone call that I really should have returned last week. Time in our house feels slow compared to the outside world and that only serves to slow me down further.

I will catch up, but it’s going to take time. My exam is tomorrow, so at least after that some revision time can be spent doing admin-y stuff, though I still have a dissertation to start, friends to see, and fresh air to breathe.

So this is a post to apologise to all those people who are missing a reply. I’m not ignoring you and it’s not personal, it’s just that some days all I manage to fit in is work, revision, and sleep. It’s also a post to let my regular followers know that there won’t be a HuffPo blog this week, because I just don’t have the time or the brain space (my brain is largely filled with the statistics exam content at the moment). Most of all, it’s a post to be honest, because I know that my social media presence is largely full of my happy, busy, life (which is my life most of the time!), but I also have difficult days and I feel they need to be included to. I’ve had a couple of messages asking for advice lately (and I will always prioritise these – so don’t be put off sending one if you feel the need to), which suggests that there are some people following me who are in a similar situation, and the last thing I want to do is paint a false picture of what living next to this crappy disease is really like.