A week of crying and doing nothing
Sickness has found me
I’ve been sick for the past week and theres been nothing I can do about it. Negative covid test after covid test I sift through the information I have trying to make sense of how bad I feel. Every morning I have expected to wake up feeling better and instead I feel worse. Most people I know have caught this and accepted their fate, waiting it out with herbs and tea and bone broth.
My relationship to productivity and study has been greatly challenged. Just making it back from my grad school residency and wanting to settle in to research and work and rigor and then immediately getting sick has made me feel worthless and like I will never be able to tackle this new found path.
I have had to invite in a gentleness to my day to day, finding new ways to make the hours go by and to take June outside and to nourish myself when it is wholly inconvenient. Light pours through the skylights and I weep.
My chronic pain, migraines, and mental illness teach me a lot about needing to slow down and to take different measures towards my work and practice. But being fully sick from head to toe, fever chilled, nose running, throat so sore I can hardly talk has me in a different state of undoing that is uncomfortable and triggers the part of me that just wants to tackle my inconsistencies of attention.
So I choose the easy lifts and turn my focus towards things that require a little less brain activity. I found that everything made me cry.