Relating Directly to Myself

Up until I got sick with Long COVID, I’d only known myself through the medium of activity. I loved reading, writing, cooking, running, hiking, paddling, swimming, skiing, learning, sewing, knitting and gardening. I loved going with Kendall and the kids to see live music, dance and theatre. I never watched TV or movies and my husband would sometimes ask if I ever missed it. “No,” was always the answer. I had zero desire to watch someone else, whether real or fictional, live life; I wanted to spend that time living mine. That’s what I did. I lived every second of my life and I did it through activity. I was never still. Whether it was physical or cognitive, I deeply knew myself through what I did. I only knew how to be with myself through an activity. If I can do nothing, if everything I love doing is taken away from me, who am I? If I am a person whose body is only capable of staring at a wall, am I still a person, do I still have life, do I still have worth?

Suddenly, COVID and then Long COVID, took every single thing away from me. Eventually, I would get the ability to write some, though it takes a lot of effort, but all those other things I loved have largely remained out of my ability. Recently I had an appointment with my doctor and we talked about wheelchairs and walkers. It’s a tough reality, but the full reality is that there are times that I won’t be able to even use those. 

Kendall would say at the beginning of my illness, this is your worst nightmare. Everything that COVID did to my body, every way it ravaged it, was like it knew my every fear and made them reality. It took over my entire body until my body could do nothing. Now stillness is my daily experience. 

I am now with myself, wholly undistracted. I’ve fought against this notion for the three+ years of this illness. Those things I loved, I wanted back because I loved them, but I also wanted them because I thought they were me. The only way I knew how to relate to myself, to know myself, was through doing an activity. When I lost the ability to do activities, I lost myself. I didn’t know who I was or what the point of living was if all I was able to do was be still. 

What I’ve been learning is that with every distraction stripped away, every medium through which I previously related to myself, and therefore knew myself, was taken from me, I was left to experience just myself in the purest way. It was just me in the room, me and my “hum” as I call it, the essence of me that is my soul. I am seeing myself at my very root for the first time. Just me. I am relating to myself directly, rather than indirectly through a distracted, projected expression via a medium, which for me was activity. 

In order to learn to be with others–my husband and my kids primarily–I needed to learn to be with myself undistracted. To be able to sit with my own being and not fight the lack of distraction. 

• Topics:
• Long Covid