Being sick is not fun. But being sick in the winter is easily the worst time to be sick. You get cold more easily, and you can also be burning but feel cold at the same time, which is a thousand percent worse.

During a winter illness, half the time, you don’t actually know what’s wrong with you.

You start to experience symptoms, one right after the other, until it snowballs into a search on WebMD. You discover you might have a life-threatening illness. You being to convince yourself that you really have said illness, no matter how ridiculous it sounds.

Laying in bed is really the most you want to do. Everyone keeps telling you to drink liquids, and you wonder if vodka counts. Hey, it’s a clear liquid, right?

Drinking lots of water makes you pee more, which is what people say will flush the sickness out of your body, but really it feels more like an inconvenience and an excuse to get out of bed. This sucks, obviously, and should not be trusted. It may, however, be blindly followed because most likely the person who told you to do so was your mom, and she tends to know a lot about stuff. Thank her for everything she has ever done for you, because you may not actually survive this ailment.

The worst things about being sick are feeling miserable and cold at the same time, while experiencing a runny nose, sore throat, and clogged sinuses. Breathing is a chore when mucus threatens to put your lungs out of business and bankrupt them from air.

Everything is a struggle when you’re sick in the winter. Getting out of bed is a chore, and even writing this short article was harder than it should’ve been. I’m sorry to say that during illness, the desire to pour my thoughts onto a page or into a Word document go right out the window. My brain feels like the mucus leaves no room for thought, as well as achy limbs that prevent me from wanting to sit and type something out.

Being sick takes a lot of energy out of you. It can feel like you need to recharge for a week after being sick for that long. This is really taxing on the mind and the body.

All of this can contribute to discouragement, but you can and will move past it. You’ll slowly get over your sickness, and revive your love of writing. You’ll be able to venture out into the world and not be miserable because you’re in pain from the germs you had been susceptible to.

If this article finds you during a sickness, I hope you have a quick recovery! Feel better soon.