Three years

This post is for Dan.

It's a funny old world.

Yesterday, I had my three-year anniversary of long COVID. I'd caught the virus at the same moment pretty much everyone did - and although my Facebook post admitted I was a little scared, I was still kind of glib. My post even joked about how when the time came, I'd wanted a strong line on my RAT test, not a weak prissy one - and now, here that strong line was. I’d gotten lucky.

[Image description: My 2022 RAT test, with its strong line. I was glib, but it IS a strong line. You can’t deny it.]

It was the last time I'd be lucky for a while - although luck, of course, is relative. Even though I was afraid of long COVID, I didn't think I'd actually get it. In those early days, we all believed it was rarer than it turned out to be; and anyway, I'd always had good health, so I would surely be at a low risk. That was my view of the world: evidence couldn't contradict it. Two months later, and still sick? I was having a bad day. Six months later, the same. It was after about two hundred or so consecutive bad days that the penny began to drop.

Even then, I waited for the moment I'd wake up and it'd magically be gone.

It's funny - and this is hard to admit - how you can think of yourself as a rational, evidence-based person, and still be wholeheartedly a dick.

Looking back, a bunch of things fed into my cognitive dissonance. Some of it was the struggle with fatigue and its loser cousin, brain fog. I could get through familiar tasks OK, although with much greater effort. (I remember a day some seven months after I got sick when I had to do a simple task: put a list of words in alphabetical order. I did it right first time and fairly quickly, and found myself grinning at my accomplishment. Still, that wasn’t quite the prompt to insight it should’ve been.)

But the effort to grapple with the unfamiliar was simply beyond me. The baseline of my life had changed. I couldn't tell how sick I was, let alone whether anything I was doing was making matters better or worse. I was just trying to hang on, get through - appear ‘normal’, whatever the hell that means. So I took a leaf out of the men's self-care handbook and pretended it all wasn't happening. (Thanks for the loan, guys, but you can have it back). And I avoided situations where I might be caught out, disappointing anyone who might expect the old me - situations where I might not be funny or sharp, might lose track of a conversation, might forget what I meant to say mid-sentence. I mean, I was too exhausted to go out anyway.

But underneath all that was something else. Like I told you, I was the lucky one, at least where health was concerned. And I clung to that: bad things didn't happen to me. And underneath that belief was something else again. I realised that, despite what my rational, evidence-based brain told me, I had some pretty stink ideas inside of me, ingrained at an emotional level. My frail body and my fits-and-starts brain made me ashamed. And in my failure to honour and to love my own body and brain, in whatever they could and couldn’t do, I failed to uphold the mana of the diverse bodies and brains of others.

At one of my lowest moments, a reader reached out to me. We’d never met, although we’ve spent time since, just weeks ago. His name is Dan, and he’s not great right now - is going through a bunch of stuff more serious than I’ve ever faced. He’d been exactly where I was, in that struggle with fatigue, and the bad days would still take him back there. He offered not advice or platitudes, but simply wisdom and solidarity and love. And I had to learn the humility to accept that love. I give Dan’s name because I want him to read this and know it was him, and that he made a difference, and that the love is returned.

I can do so much now: every week, a little more.

I still can’t do what I could. Where my brain used to dance, it sometimes stumbles, and so do my feet on the days I try to run, through the bush and by the awa. But I marvel now at what I can do - grinning and grimacing on my sweaty slog around the river track.

Maybe I’ll get better still, or maybe this it. Maybe this describes you too. Either way, you will get through with hope - not because is it fluffy or warm, but because the need for hope is rational. That’s what the evidence says. And loving yourself, your brain and your body, is not simply an option but your obligation.

You are not only yours to love.