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
(Don't know your streaming subscriptions, obvs.) A very obvious recommendation is Schitts Creek on NetFlix. A less obvious one is Only Murders in the Building, a sublime whodunnit comedy series on Disney-Star+.
If you think you may enjoy some beautiful closely observed nature writing, get a copy of The Living Mountain, in which Nan Shepherd, writing during WW2, lovingly describes the Cairngorms.
It was such a joy to see you in Vienna. My son and I were there in that crowd in Gartenbaukino, because that was his birthday present to me this year.
It breaks my heart to read that you are dealing with Long Covid now. As I have written several times in my own blog, I find all accounts of Long Covid seriously alarming, because it reminds me of what we all went through together when my son (the one who was there with me in row 8) developed a rare form of recurrent viral meningitis sixteen years ago. There are no short cuts and no amount of will power or "positive thinking" will make it better. It's not you, it's our society that has to change to accommodate you and all the countless people going through the same thing.
All my sympathy and best wishes, and thank you for being you.
P.S. If you feel up to reading and want something intelligently entertaining, personally I would recommend The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.