I'm not ok.
Last Friday was rough.
On Thursday, I had my rescheduled meeting with a prospective client, the first important meeting since my COVID symptoms had intensified.
For 57 minutes, I was “on,” charming, and high energy. I pitched a program on strategies to take our inner voices from critical to compassionate. We laughed a lot, and I audibly cheered with excitement at least once.
Midway through, the brain fog rolled in. I acknowledged it to my client and persisted. I had such fun and likely landed the gig. I did all the things!
And then I crashed. Hard.
I canceled all remaining plans for the day. When I called my bestie to postpone, she lovingly suggested I go to bed immediately because I’d started to sound like the sleepy little tea mouse from Alice in Wonderland.
I napped that afternoon, slept 9 hours that night, and still woke up exhausted the next day.
Nearly 3 weeks after getting COVID, I was impatient and incapacitated. While I didn’t require hospitalization, it’s the worst I’d felt in recent memory. This confused me.
We tend to frame COVID in binaries:
You get a mild case (sneeze 6 times and you’re done!), or you’re hospitalized.
You have symptoms for 2 days, or you’re a long hauler, navigating the residual effects indefinitely.
People seem to think that if you’re vaccinated and otherwise healthy, you’ll be fine. I’m absolutely max-vaxxed, and weeks into the illness with symptoms that felt anything but mild, I did not feel fine. I felt broken and pathetic.
Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood claims he has “the constitution of a rhino.” That sounds like my husband, who bounces back from being sick almost immediately. I’m more like a sickly giraffe, quirky and extremely vulnerable with all that sensitive neck area exposed all the damn time.
With COVID, Cole was already 100% when I was low-key bed ridden. As I lamented my slow recovery, I was heartened to hear friends share that it’d taken them a month to improve fully. While I was sorry for their suffering, I was relieved not to be the only giraffe.
If we live long enough, we’ll all have a disability at some point in our lives. We’ll all know what it’s like to live with diminished capacity, relative to fully able-bodied people. (Spoon theory and @nina_tame capture this beautifully.)
How can we have compassion for ourselves and one another?
As is so often the case,
My suffering lay in the gap between how I felt and how I wanted to feel.
It remained difficult to accept my very real weaknesses in real time.
I illustrated the image below to coach myself through my feelings, and it truly helped. It gave me the permission I needed (again) to just be sick.
As I’ve shared it with friends, they’ve told me it’s helped them too. I now imagine us all at a Not Okay Ice Cream Café “enjoying” flavors like
Cookies and Scream
Berry Ennui
Vanilla Bean Better
Mocha Almond Funk
Butter Pecan’t
Rocky Road
We nod knowingly at one another, each thinking at least we’re in this together. (OK Not to Be OK plays on loop.)
As friends have asked how I’m doing, I tell them I’m striving for self-compassion and patience in my recovery, albeit with intermittent success. That said, I’m trending in the right direction.
Cheers to the feels, y’all (even the shitty ones),
Lelia