Love and tulips

and writing to my toenails

I have only had one and a half dodgy health days in the last two weeks and it feels like a miracle. Mum has started putting ticks on her calendar to mark the good days and we are getting a streak going.

The other day I was in the supermarket buying tulips when I had the thought, ‘You could have people around for dinner…’ I hadn’t had a thought like this in, well, I don’t know how long.

I haven’t had the energy to even be awake most evenings, let alone cook, let alone want to have people over… and talk to them! The fact that this seemed like something nice shows how well I am feeling.

It also showed me how unwell I have been.

I got my first covid in March 2020 and had it several times after that. I now see that each time a bit more of me fell away until - just to be dramatique - it felt like there was nothing left but a bed rotting creature with unwashed hair and debt.

At one point I cried to my sister that ‘I used to be a person who liked doing things, someone who had friends and went places.’

‘You are still that person,’ she replied. ‘You are just ill.’

But when you are ill for a long time it can feel like you are whole different person and that you are going to be that person forever. I was trying to accept that reality and to make peace with it.

Without realising it, I had given up hope that I’d get well.

I hoped that with more broccoli and sleep that maybe I could manage it and get some more good days but I didn’t think I’d get back to being able to go places and do things like I used to.

But now I think that maybe I am getting well. Like, properly well.

I am almost scared of saying that in case it’s tempting fate. I’ve had good days before but they were followed by a crash… but this is the longest good bit I’ve had in a while. And the goodest good bit… I don’t just not feel terrible, I feel… well, good!!

I want to celebrate. I want to - literally - shout it out the window.

I feel good, I feel good, I feel good!

I went to the local sauna with one of my neighbours on Friday night. We’d done the same thing two weeks earlier when I was in a lot of pain and had felt bad complaining about it. What bad manners. Nobody wants that on a Friday night.

I was delighted that this time I could really, truly say that I was well.

‘I’m so well!’ I said.

‘Say it again,’ she asked.

I said it again.

She grinned.

‘Now say it without sounding so surprised. Say it like you trust it.’

I did my best but it’s hard to trust it.

I am still a bit scared of doing things in case I push myself back but I want to make the most of the good days and if I have a little dip again, so be it. At least I enjoyed today.

And it’s nice to enjoy things again. I hadn’t quite realised how little I’d been able to enjoy things the last year or so. Almost everything I was doing felt like spending money when you know you are hugely overdrawn. You want to do the thing and you are just about getting away with it and yet you know deep down you do not have the resources to do it.

Even going downstairs to chat to Nelly for an hour took out of me. I would head back up to bed straight afterwards. This had become so normal I didn’t really see how un-normal it was. My life had got smaller and smaller until anything beyond the bed or my sofa or the coffee shop across the road almost didn’t exist.

Last week Nelly asked if I wanted to work in her studio in Shoreditch - something she often asks but which I always say no to. Shoreditch isn’t far but with fatigue it may as well be China. But last week I said ‘yes’. What’s more, I had the thought, ‘It’s a nice day, you could walk.’

Even a few weeks ago the idea of walking to Shoreditch would have felt like climbing Mount Everest when you have pneumonia: a dangerous and reckless thing to do.

But I walked and I was fine!

I also went to the cinema on Saturday (the Brutalist, super long, I loved it, Nelly didn’t) and a bit of me worried that sitting in a cinema in cold season was asking for trouble but I don’t want to live this way. Almost anything can be bad for you - but maybe almost anything can be good for you too? Going out on a Saturday night like a regular person and eating popcorn was probably as good for my soul as the germs might be bad for my body.

As it happened I did wake up feeling rough with swollen glands on Sunday, but I slept for the day and yesterday I felt mostly OK. My bounce back is bouncing back. I hope.

Last night I started going through old notebooks of Morning Pages - basically hundreds of pages on how shit I feel. Not a gripping read. Things started to get quite trippy when I found page after page of me writing letters to various ailing body parts.

Dear Neck, why are you hurting me? I had written in blue biro. My neck had answered: I want you to lighten up. Dear Back Pain, I wrote, what are you trying to teach me? To lean on others, it replied. I knew I’d done a bit of that kind of writing but I hadn’t realise how much of it I’d done and how insightful the answers were. Well, insightful or straight up madness. Who knows? Who cares? I am now entering my ‘mad woman’ era where if my toenail wants to write me a letter, I’ll read it.

I also found the sentence: ‘Joy will cure you’, written sometime in 2023. I’ve put it by my desk as a reminder. It feels true.

And right now I am joyful. I can walk. I can work. I can theoretically have people over for dinner. I still can’t cook, but that’s what pizza was invented for.

Love and tulips to you all.

mx

PS neighbours have asked me what I think has made the difference and it’s hard to say. Here are some of the many things I have been doing: sauna, meditation, intense broccoli / chicken soup eating, sleeping, visualising being well, massage, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, angry stomping on the days I feel bad (Spotify, it turns out, has a whole world of angry music play lists). Nelly records the sound from her flat and it honestly sounds like a stampede but it helps. I mean the building might fall down but what can you do? What a way to go!

I don’t want to attribute getting well to any one thing because well, this might not last and also I don’t know. I think many things contributed to getting me unwell, and that it will take many things to rebuild myself.

PPS I have been grateful for messages you’ve sent about your own health stuff. It makes me feel more normal. Thank you.