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.
I forget to write.
My pens lay inked in their pouch and wait. I think about journalling but I don't get around to it. I do not want to make time for it. Words feel superfluous. There is irony in that sentence. Words? Superfluous? I've always been in love with words, fascinated by the process of language and endlessly lost in novels and stories of my own, and yet... and yet. Words feel superfluous right now.
I have emptied many ink converters over the last year. I was referred to the long covid clinic after nearly two years of tests, of feeling well, of feeling increasingly awful. I wrote then. I wrote frenetically, compulsively. I needed to make sense of the shift in my body, of the rampaging, ravaging grief that consumed me and threatened to tip me into the void of darkness. I cried a lot over these words. I found refuge in these words when my anxiety grip me so tightly I struggled to breathe.
What happened to change all of this?
I am not sure.
I simply stopped writing and no matter how much I consider making time for my journal, I am not pulled to it. Life keeps happening and I feel I ought to record some of it but do not. Now is not the time for words. I carry silence instead.
I meditate, sit still and breathe. I explore the world of breathwork and feel my body tingle and relax. I mimic the gesture of the tai chi instructor and feel muscles long out of use awaken in gentle aches. I walk through the world and watch it move. I see again, truly. I seek the russet fur of foxes, I listen for the wrens and robins and magpies and crows. I stop in awe at a cluster of geese leaving our shores. I witness the moon and stand incredibly still, my right calf pulsing with a pain I barely feel. I walk every night to the cricket pitch or just the end of the street on a bad day.
I do not quite understand how all of this happened. I have never been able to sustain a meditation practice. Every time I attempted it, stress engulfed me and I stopped. I always stopped. My best guess is that I used to attempt meditation in time of anxiety and one more thing to do was one more thing to worry about, and I am excellent at worrying, A+ student of the practice. This time I sat down and closed my eyes from a place of calm and quiet.
I seek to dig deeper into what worked for me this time but words muddle my thoughts. I rationalise and dissect when I suspect the truth is as simple as it gets: I met up with my mom in early August.
It was just her, my brother, and me. I recalibrated, remembered what it felt like to be around her calm demeanour, what it felt like to be the small unit of three we were for so long. It was not an easy unit to be. Imagine an ADHD kid and an autistic kid with widely diverging needs and the stubbornness to demand they be realised without understanding ADHD or autism. Still, for the longest time the three of us was all we had and through the blazes, we stuck together, we loved each other. In her own gentle way of not quite suggesting things my mom taught me some breathing techniques to quieten my anxieties, to relax. I know she knew then that she was teaching me more, without saying anything, without the use of words. My body understood before my mind could catch up. I continued the exercises without a thought for them. I wondered what it would feel like to push a little further, to meditate, to seek out more information about breathworks. The seed had been planted and all I had to do was keep it alive. For that words are not necessary, they get in the way, make me forget.