My Fear of Rest and Relaxation.

A brief Covid dispatch.

Hello, loves.

I posted that last update on the day I came down with COVID. I’m triple vaxxed and recently boosted. Even so, I hoped would be a short illness has knocked me on my backside.

I tested negative again for the first time on Monday. I woke at 3am on Tuesday in some of the worst pain of my life. Pain that was acute and unfamiliar enough that I called an ambulance. A nice paramedic did all the checks to make sure I wasn’t having a cardiac or pulmonary crisis, and told me what everyone else has told me: rest. No, more than that. Long COVID is nobody’s fault, but pushing yourself to recover as fast as possible sure stacks the deck against you.

COVID, it turns out, isn’t a problem I can solve with my usual tools. You can’t just power through it. You can’t hustle it. You can’t hard-work-and-positive-attitude your way around this virus. Internalised capitalism won’t help you here any more than the external sort.

Yeah, I hate this. I hate doing things I’m not good at, and I’m really, really not very good at being ill or taking time off. I appreciate your patience while I continue to angrily convalesce. I have posts to post. Deadlines to deliver. All of that is going to have to happen much more slowly than I wanted it to.

I also have a spouse in another country, who I was meant to fly out to visit two whole weeks ago now. I’m hoping that another week of infuriating relaxation will be enough to get me well enough to travel. I miss him like hell.

I miss you all, too. I’ll gladly take recommendations of soothing, really absorbing books and shows to get me through the bloody annoying enforced downtime. Meanwhile, I’ve a post coming later on which is incredibly personal and important to me, and when you read it I hope you’ll understand why.

All my love. L x