This whole thread is very valuable to me. Thank you to everyone who has contributed. I’m 68 and have been sick for only a year (though I had lesser bouts with CFS before), and it makes me realize I’m lucky to have had as many healthy years as I did. I’m a poet, and was a teacher and editor/publisher, very active, traveling and performing, also very engaged in Zen practice, gardening, and sewing. Now I can be up and about for 3 or 4 hours a day at most, and if I do anything in the least strenuous (even a phone call or a little weeding) it can knock me down for a few days. I really thought I would be able to come to term with this illness, haha. For a while I persuaded myself I was dealing with it as well as could be expected, but now I must admit to feeling defeated. I’ve suffered from depression all my life, have been on antidepressants for 30 years, but this despair is beyond pharmaceutical help. My Zen training has allowed me to understand the experience in one way: I know that the present moment is all there is, that nothing is permanent, that clinging to what I don’t have is a source of suffering—yes, yes, yes, but I was wholly unprepared for the almost complete loss of power to create, to do good in the world, to fix whatever’s broken, to help other people. And more selfishly, to take pleasure in the sound of the wind or the taste of blueberries, or the antics of our beautiful dog. I do still value these things of course, but they seem so . . . fragile, temporary, ghostlike. Actually, I’m the ghost! Well, maybe I’ll get a few good (skinny) poems out of it.