This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
Days come and go and merge into an amorphous blur in my mind. I lay in bed. I lay on the sofa. I fall asleep. I wake up and linger in grogginess for a while. This much I remember. Yet I know there are more to my days. There are the workdays filled with spreadsheets and Teams messages and the fog of letters and numbers in the afternoon. On one evening, my partner drives me to the plant table of my old cycle commute. I snuggle my face in a small pot of marjoram and breathe in the slight lemony scent as deep as I can. I revive a little but still fall asleep uncommonly early. Nine to ten hours later, I awake, somewhat refreshed, somewhat not.
It is Friday now and I do not have to work. In the morning I sit in the garden and watch swifts fly in the blue blue sky. I smile from ear to ear at the sight of their looping dance. I have missed them and was starting to worry they would not come back to my neighbourhood, but then, I have lived indoors, crashed down for so much of the time over the past couple of weeks, that I missed their arrival. I am glad to see them now.
Later, a friend picks me up and we drive to the local park. I do not like to be driven to a place I used to walk to, to a place I can theoretically cycle to, but I know I am still too unwell to do any of this. A car it has to be. We sit and lay on a blue and purple blanket and chat and chat and chat. Hours go by and I do not notice. It is only when I need the toilet and check my watch that I see it is past 6pm. It is time to go home.
On Saturday, another friend picks me up from home, early this time to head for the lake. We change into our bathing suits. I have donned my thermal boots and gloves but find that I do not need them. My feet are almost too warm in the water now well into the double digits (Celsius). My body no longer tingles and prickles but is comfortable. The water has thickened too and I find myself swimming slowly. My friend urges me on but I remind her that I cannot speed up. I need to control my heart rate. We swim on, her longer than me. Dried and changed we head out for breakfast and spend an hour catching up, talking of work and hobbies and family and all things inconsequential yet important. She drops me back home and I collapse on the sofa, falls asleep immediately. I remain in a state of doziness all day. In the evening, slouched on the sofa, my partner and I watch an old film. I almost fall asleep yet again.
On Sunday, I catch up with another friend in the morning, this time over Zoom because he lives in Australia and I live in the UK. We chat and I learn of the oncoming winter as I tell him of the upcoming summer. We talk about Queer Out Here (shameless plug: Queer Out Here is an audio zine that explores the outdoors from queer perspectives. We are open from submissions right now and desperately need some. Get in touch if you're interested and spread the words to folks who may be). Our chat finished, I return to bed and linger for a while, let my body and mind find some rest. Later, my partner and I watch more Murder, She Wrote. We had planned to catch-up with the Eurovision final but neither of us have the energy for it. Early in the evening we head to bed. I catch up with my diary and find some strength to read a little of the book I have on the go. I am glad of this and wonder if soon I'll have the strength to return to the medieval reading challenge. I have been missing it. We switch the lights off early. The following day I have to work.
I worry a little about all the sleep, all the drowsy grogginess, but I remember too that I felt the same over the end of years holiday. I had nothing planned in my days, nowhere to be and much less to do, and yet I slept so much. My nights were long, my naps common. I worried then that I was oversleeping, that I was not helping my body heal in anyway, that I was doing damage to myself, but I let it all happen. I needed the rest both physically and mentally. I was barely standing off the edge of depression and the last thing I needed was to push myself in anyway. I got better. I returned to a more normal sleeping pattern, I learned to rest, to pace, to take it slow, and it worked. It worked so well that in March I was able to holiday with my family and my partner and had a great time. So this time, as I spend so much time in sleep again, I trust that I need it. I trust that my body knows what its doing as I rest and sleep and use up all my energy to recover from too much post exertional malaise.