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.
'How are you doing,' the doctor of the Long Covid clinic asks me.
'I'm okay.' The words come easily and for the first time in all of our appointments, tears do not fall. I am truly okay. There is plenty that is wrong. My legs have been in pain for over a month which is unusual, the pill is not yet working as it should and my hormones still wreak havoc in my body, fatigue still devours me more often than not, but I am okay.
This is life now and after months of saying that this new life is okay, I finally truly believe it. I've always believed it. I don't get to choose the random events that happen in my life, like catching Covid when my partner and I are so cautious about it, like developing Long Covid. I have been told again and again that it isn't fair but this is not about fairness. It is life and a lot of it is out of our control. So, yes, it's always been okay for my life to have changed in such a drastic way. Does it suck? Yes, it does, but there is no use me fighting a losing battle. A part of my brain has always known this but another bigger part of my brain needed time to digest the change.
I don't think I truly will digest the change. It's been violent in so many ways. It's reshaped so much of the core of me. It didn't change me but it asked of me to revise everything, to understand my life in a completely different way. I sometimes say that Long Covid doesn't define me, it's just a part of me. Those are words I do not believe in. They are true. I am not just Long Covid but right now, it's a prism through which everything is perceived and calculated. I am assuming that with time all this will change. My new routines will become so ingrained I will not think of them as 'I'm doing this to manage Long Covid'. Instead I'll think of them as 'I'm doing this', but this reality is fuzzy. I cannot conceive of it yet.
The Long Covid doctor tells me about what happens next. This is our last appointment and in six months time I will officially be discharged from the service. It is a terrifying thought but one I welcome. It's the familiar sort of terrifying of new steps into an unknown. The extraordinary support I received from the clinic and the associated services they pointed me to has come to an end. It has worked. It has all worked. I was lifted from the edge of depression. I was soothed and cared for. I was listened to and validated. I was made to feel human. I was told repeatedly that yes this is hard and yes this is shit but that I am doing well regardless. I have been believed, provided with a framework to explain my pain and fatigue. I have been given the space and the time to fall and cry and cry and cry and cry. Those sessions with the doctor should have ended two sessions ago but she kept booking appointments because I kept dissolving into tears in every single one of our chats, my world incomprehensible and insurmontable. Yet here I am. Six months after our initial chat and I am okay.
It's still hard and it's still shit but I know what to do. The lessons I have learned in the last six months have sank in and it's easier to pace and rest. I still mess up because sometimes I just want to live like before and forget about the consequences. I still make mistakes because this Long Covid thing is not linear and I do not truly bodily understand it. I still carry the weight of a society that tells me to push on regardless of illness. I am still afraid of asking for sick days at work when I should because I see the sickness scale on the HR portal rise to red fast. I am still gripped by guilt and fear when I cancel yet another meeting with a friend.
But it is all okay. I have tools I know how to use and plans for the future that look bright and excite me. My world is changed but it's not the first time this has happened. It's the first time it's been quite so violent and entirely unprompted by me, but I am nothing if not resilient and endlessly optimistic. Years of ripping myself from my environment again and again, of reshaping myself again and again have, for better or for worse, taught me to be flexible, to find meaning in different ways, to seek a new place in a new world. So, yes, I am okay.
I am okay.