Last Updated on 21 July, 2026 by Cara Sutra
Welcome to series 4 of my Life Unscripted series of personal essays, sharing all the various facets of my personal life, behind the scenes and background information I’ve never written about here on the blog before, interwoven with my sexuality and kink interests. This sub-category of Life Unscripted is entitled Fatigue & Fire: Learning to Live with Chronic Illness. Mostly I’ll be writing about balancing my ongoing work, and the challenge of running my own business, with having to live with M.E., ageing as a woman, plus other health issues. This post is my official introduction to this sub-series.
Fatigue and fire may seem like opposite concepts, and I suppose they are, but they’re both part of me regardless. I retain the intense passion and drive of my healthier youth, but in my present day-to-day life I experience crushing fatigue, as well as other physical side effects of illness and disability. The resulting frustration is an unchangeable part of my reality, something I must learn to live alongside.
Earlier this year I wrote a long piece about the sudden onset of M.E. and what my daily life looks like now. If you haven’t read From FitBit to Visible: Learning to Live with M.E. yet, please do. Expect the posts in this upcoming Fatigue and Fire series to assume you know which health conditions I live with, what M.E. is, and how I came to have it and what it’s changed about my life.
It’s one thing to write about what I live with, and another to think on a deeper level about the ways in which illness has changed my life, and how it’s forced changes in my approach to work. I’m self-employed; the CaraSutra brand is my full-time job, this blog the result of much hard work over the past seventeen years. When I started, I was young, energetic, actively polyamorous and relished the woman-love aspect of my bisexuality, as well as my pansexuality as a whole. I actively sought more submissives and slaves as a Domme in the FemDom aspect of the BDSM scene. I attended sex industry events, whether here in the UK or abroad, promoting my blog, brand, and marketing services during boozy networking events with potential clients. Oh yes, that’s when I was still drinking; I’m fully sober now. And I wasn’t as deaf as I am now. So much has changed. But I’m still here, still blogging, still reviewing, still kinky, still pansexual, still fuelled by stubborn determination.
The contrast between what I want to do, and what I’m able to do, is what I’ll be writing about throughout this series.
Why Fatigue & Fire?
This sub-series of Life Unscripted is called Fatigue and Fire because, as I’ve already mentioned, both these concepts are important parts of who I am. It accurately describes how I live, with the ongoing challenges of M.E. and my constant determination to never give up, to always do my best to achieve my goals.
I still have goals, both personal and relating to my work here at the CaraSutra blog. My drive hasn’t gone anywhere, and despite suffering low libido last year, and worrying that it had gone away permanently, my sex drive has come back recently too.
My desire for sex and pleasure is partnered by a desire to share sex-positive, accurate and genuinely helpful sexual education, kink advice and my own BDSM experiences, honest reviews of bedroom products, and personal insights about all aspects of my personality and life.
Some days I work for a few hours in my office, then I need to rest all afternoon and evening. Sometimes I work from bed, as it’s more comfortable and I know I haven’t got the spoons for an office work session. Other days I know I’ve overdone things somehow, and I’m still learning to pace and stay within my energy limits, so on those days I suffer a PEM crash and can’t do anything at all. Throughout it all, the fire is still there within me to create, to share my thoughts and feelings, to help, guide, advise, and yes, arouse my readers. To ignite pleasure and revel in it.
The fire may feel like dying embers sometimes, but over the years, no matter what I’ve gone through, it’s never been fully extinguished.
What This Series Is (And Isn’t)
I’m not writing Fatigue and Fire to produce a “guide to productivity despite challenges!” or attempt to give you “hacks to defeat chronic illness and disabilities!” or similar which would be incredibly insulting. I don’t have any tips or advice. I don’t have a system, or a schedule, or a way of living and working that works perfectly. I’m still blindly feeling my way through my personal and health issues and fucking up regularly.
What I want to share throughout this series is simply my observations from living and working with these issues. It will directly help me and be so therapeutic to write it all out, and of course I hope that what I’m experiencing and writing about resonates with somebody out there. To make you feel less alone with it all.
I plan to write about what being productive means to me now, and how the meaning of it has changed over time. About being forced to pace myself, which like I say I’m not very good at, because my fire often tells my fatigue it can do one, only for the fatigue to come back and knock me on my arse for several days. I want to talk about the fear of being seen as lazy, because I’m not doing as much as I used to. About imposter syndrome. And the grief that comes with going from doing daily exercise, sometimes to fanatical levels, to not being able to exercise at all, and having to sit down to complete even simple, everyday tasks like laundry or having a shower.
And, of course, how my new physical reality affects my sex life. This is still primarily a sex blog, after all; and my readers come to learn about sex and pleasure in all its forms. Sex takes a lot of energy. Experiencing a high, or even simply active sex drive seems to be the result of balance. A tricky balance between mental health and mood, physical health and energy level, working through historical issues such as trauma, especially when the trauma may be sex-related, the impact of changing hormones, the effect of various medications, body image, perimenopause, ageing, and probably tons of other stuff that I can’t remember due to brain fog.
Don’t expect tidy essays with neat conclusions that wrap everything up in a pretty bow. I’m not writing any of this from a done and dusted perspective, I’m still very much in the trenches. I’ll be sharing how it all feels, the truth of my frustrations, the hopes I had, and how they have been forced to evolve into the hopes I now have, and anything I might have learned so far.
Who This Series Is For
Fatigue and Fire is for anyone struggling with the imbalance between their hopes and goals, and their physical, emotional or psychological reality. If you have a chronic health condition such as M.E. (also known as CFS/ME), long COVID, fibromyalgia, or similar that has forced changes to your personal or working life that you aren’t comfortable or happy about, this series is for you.
Perhaps you’re self-employed, like me, and you’re living with an illness or disability which means your body doesn’t cooperate like it used to, or like you want it to. Any ambition or career dreams can feel as likely as winning the lottery. This series is for you.
Even if none of the above applies to you, maybe you know someone who is. Or maybe you’re just curious about how I’m living and working right now. You’re welcome here, too.
Below is a rough plan for the posts I want to write for this Fatigue and Fire series. This isn’t a comprehensive list, and these are just working titles. I may adjust or add to these in time.
- Living with M.E. and redefining personal productivity
- Being bad at pacing as a fatigued workaholic
- The fear of being labelled lazy when you live with invisible illness
- How I keep on working with an ageing and disabled body
- Chronic fatigue and how it changed my relationship with ambition
- Ways I keep my blog alive when my body and brain shut down
- My grief process over losing the ability to exercise
- How libido, sex and intimacy have changed for me due to chronic illness
Thank you for being here, and staying by my side through this new and extremely challenging chapter of my life.
