The hardest phase of recharging?

Please note that this is my personal experience. People will have different experiences. This pattern may not be applicable to, for example, a parent of young children. Or for fatigue with different causes/profiles. 

Throughout the past decade of living with disabling levels of fatigue from several causes (hypermobility and autonomic dysfunction), I have periodically had times where I've had to push beyond my pacing boundaries for several months due to external factors. This makes my health go steadily down hill, then once the external factor is gone, recovery for me seems to have a fairly consistent pattern:

1. Crash phase: External factor stops - the pressure is off, so I crash out. Hibernation and snacking is pretty much all I can do. But a couple of weeks/month of this and I start to improve.

2. Honeymoon phase: With the memory of both the crash phase, and the long period of increasing exhaustion before it, even the ability to sit up and be able to think, have a short conversation without being utterly drained, or be able to watch a TV show and enjoy it are beautiful beyond measure. During this phase I make the decision to be off work - so I have nothing on my 'should do' list. And each day I do less than I have capacity to do - which allows me to recharge a little more each day. And I can choose to do things - maybe even go on an outing, because all other responsibilities have been postponed.

But I can't do that indefinitely, so:

3. Return to 'basic duties' (albeit reduced) - work, housework, showering, etc. (And yes, my house does get in a right state during the first two phases!)

4. Return to 'daily life' - socialising is added back in, and full work duties return. At this stage I'm almost certainly not 'fully recovered', so 'daily life' is different to before I pushed my boundaries, but it is a pattern of living that should be sustainable. And will hopefully allow a slight upward trend in my capacity, and I'd hope in a year or two to be back where I was before I started the downhill cycle (although that's far from guaranteed).

Stages 3 and 4 are HARD. I'm ready to add things back in, but still need to be really gentle on myself. Only limits have changed, and the effects of overstepping those limits can take a few days to show - creating a bit of a rollercoaster of unknowns. So my "I think this should be within capacity" decisions are almost always wrong. I'm left exhausted. It feels like it's set my recovery back - and I have to back off for a few days then try again with a different approach and better understanding of and respect for where my health is actually at. After a while I get better at thinking "I think I will cope with this, but actually I'm going to try half the time, increase wheelchair use, and make sure I have several periods where I don't talk" etc.

Another thing that makes it hard is that I feel SO much better but also SO far under par. If you ask me how I'm doing at stage 3 or 4 I'm likely to say 'marvelously' - because in comparison to how I was, this is absolutely true. However, in comparison to where my baseline was before I went downhill, my health is actually pretty rubbish. So emotionally it's a strange position to be in - it makes communicating about my status when friends ask much harder too. Having had a number of very confused interactions, I've settled on "In comparison to where I was a few months ago, marvelous, But I still have a long way to go before my base line is where it used to be."

So...not really sure whether other people can relate to this, but thought I'd share it, just in case you do.