Sphinx

The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to this new epidemic of the after-effects of the plague. It’s full of striking and memorable phrases (“cosplaying normality”!), and you simply need to go and read it, and reflect.

I found it quite uncomfortable, to be honest. This is clearly because, while she emphasises that acceptance is something that will come in its own time, or not, and one shouldn’t rush towards it, this is still an essay about acceptance, about letting go of the life that went before and the person you used to be and, perhaps most importantly and painfully, the life you thought you would go on to lead.

The life you still feel you can almost reach out and touch gradually becomes less vivid, less immediate, until it really does seem like it belongs to someone else, someone who’s gone.

But I am nowhere near this point. I am still at the stage of feeling that I am not me, and struggling – not really to the benefit of my overall health – to try to recover that person, grasping after the flashes and flickers of my old self that emerge from the fog and fatigue, tantalisingly out of reach, like the marsh lights that lead travellers into bogs. The constant hope that suddenly this will all just go away, the clouds will lift and I’ll be back, or if I can just do X, or find Y, it will all be right again. This, at the moment, is not who I am, and I’m not willing to give up on everything that ‘I’ had in mind for the coming years, even if I’m not capable at the moment of any of it.

I feel this especially at the moment because I’m trying to write, and finding it painful even on the good days – and the fact that I can still do this sort of stream-of-consciousness personal stuff may not be helping. So I really empathised with Maria’s account of this:

I remember pulling each sentence rather brutally from the morass of my former abilities and piling them on top of each other. Let’s just say the angel of history made sense to me in a way she had not, before. Minute on minute, I could barely make the letters settle into words, forget about forming sentences or ideas, but day on day it turned out I could do it. It just took a higher threshold of discomfort than I’d previously believed manageable, and about eight times longer.

Again, I’m not there (yet?). I don’t have piles of sentences even; it’s more like a floor covered with fragments of sentences, like the pieces of a jigsaw when you’ve just emptied them out of the box, and the picture that would help me start putting them together is stained and torn and partially lost, and maybe this is a couple of different jigsaws jumbled together. A blg post can start, and ramble on for a bit, and then stop; that doesn’t really work for academic articles. And perhaps this is another ground for refusing to accept things, that I simply don’t know if I can learn a new approach, even if I recognise that the old one was pretty hit-and-miss.

I can’t remember if I mentioned on here that I had actually got to the point of having a chat with Occupational Health; it’s not that I had any expectation of them producing a magic solution, or even that I particularly need accommodations, but the idea was that this would make me take this more seriously, as an ongoing condition rather than a temporary blip. I think this needs a bit more work…