Last week was my four-year Covidversary: the anniversary of my first day of Covid symptoms.
And the anniversary of starting my thru-hike was exactly one week before it.
So to say that March is an emotionally loaded month would be an understatement. 😅
I recently stumbled across a quote I’d written down in 2019, about a year after I finished my thru-hike, from Caroline Van Hemert's The Sun Is a Compass: My 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds:
But uncertainty has become the only constant. Rather than adhering to schedules or itineraries, our days are shaped by the landscape; each valley, each river, each pass slightly different from the last. We can't know the weather, or the height of the bushes in the next valley, or when we might cross paths with a bear or a wolf. We are here, now, and that is enough. After almost five months, movement brings stillness. Movement brings peace. (p. 229)
When I first scribbled this quote down in my commonplace book, it was because of the last couple sentences:
We are here, now, and that is enough. After almost five months, movement brings stillness. Movement brings peace.
When I was on-trail, I felt like I made sense in ways I never had off-trail. The movement was a huge piece of that; it was like six months of walking meditation. Things stirred up and settled. There was a kind of peace to the whole thing despite the adversity of the experience.
What’s interesting is that I am far more drawn to the sentences before those now:
But uncertainty has become the only constant. Rather than adhering to schedules or itineraries, our days are shaped by landscape; each valley, each river, each pass slightly different from the last. We can’t know the weather, or the height of the bushes in the next valley, or when we might cross paths with a bear or a wolf.
I’m not sure I could invent a better metaphor for what Long Covid (LC) is like.
Uncertainty IS the only constant.
Uncertainty each day around how much energy I’ll have that day, or what symptoms will appear over the course of the day, or how my cognitive function will be. I’ve gotten to a place where I can somewhat predict how things will go based on the previous day, but it’s definitely more art than science. There are still always surprises.
And that uncertainty, the unpredictability of my body and brain, means that adhering to schedules or itineraries is unlikely. I can do it, kind of, with limited things planned, by pacing myself and my energy.
But if you gave me a day full of meetings or appointments, I would crumble partway through.
My days are shaped by the landscape of my symptoms; by variables I’m aware of and can, to some extent, control (like hydration, food, rest) and those I can’t control or am not aware of.
No two days are the same, symptom-wise, each slightly different, though they’re often variations on the same themes.
And I can’t know what’s going to throw me for a loop when I start the day: anything that causes high emotions usually causes me issues that day or the next; sometimes I break out in weird rashes despite not having done, gone, eaten, or worn anything different from the days before; stress and strain can deflate a good cognitive day within an hour.
But it makes me wonder: did thru-hiking give me tools here that others lack? Did that uncertainty, that sense of powerlessness about terrain and weather, the constantly trying to manage my nerve-damaged feet and my caloric intake… did that prepare me, in some weird way, for this current reality?
I believe it did. It feels like it did.
And maybe that belief is all that matters.
I’m in a Long Covid group online for people who got sick before April 1, 2020. Those of us infected with the original strain tend to have a slightly different “flavor” of LC than those who came after. But this group in particular is useful because we’re the longest of the longhaulers. We are all people who got sick when no one knew anything about Covid, when it was thought to be only respiratory, when there were no tests and no protocols and we were often advised to do things that are the exact opposite of what patients are told now.
And because all of us got sick before April 1st, a lot of the group has been noting their Covidversaries lately.
Four years. It’s like a college degree, except none of us get to graduate and move on to bigger and better things.
I haven’t posted in the group about my Covidversary, but it is clear to me that among my cohort, I am luckier than most.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to see the path as maybe a bit predestined:
I took up running. Then long-distance cycling.
Then I got into triathlon, which taught me about overuse injuries and endurance, and gave me the confidence to finally attempt a thru-hike I’d dreamed of for years.
I thru-hiked and learned what managing chronic pain felt like and how to function with a fair amount of brain fog (caused by burning more calories than I could consume), how to persist against difficult odds physically on my own but to seek support from afar when I needed it.
I learned the power of the narrative in my own head, and when to interrupt it vs. letting it play out. I learned that most of the things that impact us on any given day are far beyond our control. I learned who the people in my life were who would truly show up. And I learned how tenuous some of my identities were, as the hiker I became was nothing like the hiker I thought I’d be.
I had a long, distressing recovery from that, and right as I was getting back to thinking I could take up longer hikes or triathlon again, I got sick with Covid.
Long Covid has been a lesson writ large on so many of those same themes: persistence in the face of pain and adversity; managing chronic conditions that others don’t understand but will too happily offer you ill-informed advice on; figuring out how to live with cognitive impairment that at times is mortifying and humbling; the unpredictability and lack of control we have over a lot of what happens with our bodies; how fickle and fragile the identities we think matter to us really are and how terrifying it is when they’re all stripped away.
I would not wish this last step in my journey on anyone. There are far better ways to gain these insights and self-awareness.
But I also know that without LC, I’d still be pushing my body and my mind far beyond a reasonable capacity most of the time. I wouldn’t be so tuned in.
I would likely still be injuring myself from training too much or pushing myself too hard. In this sense, the experience has been a useful one. (But if I could take a pill tomorrow that would make it go away: I would. In a heartbeat.)
What I do know for certain is that the peace I found through movement while I was thru-hiking, the sense of self that I unearthed during that process: that is the only reason I have survived LC without killing myself, as a percentage of LC patients in my cohort have.
Others opted out after too many weeks or months or years of feeling shitty every single day, of having poorly informed doctors tell them it was all in their head, or having family members accuse them of being lazy, or just to escape the never-ending tinnitus.
Thanks to thru-hiking, I had some understanding of myself beneath all the other things, and some inherent belief that “me” wasn’t just my body or my mind.
I believe that this is the only reason I’ve been able to cope.
Because honestly? I still want to be a triathlete, though it is impossible. I still want to do other thru-hikes for weeks or months at a time. I was very happy creating a difficult but personally meaningful life in that way, and I still grieve the loss of that path forward every day.
I grieve the loss of many of my hopes and dreams; chunks of my memory; a lot of my mental acuity; the sense of independence, autonomy, and agency I had; a night falling asleep to the sound of nothing instead of the tinnitus in my right ear; the ability to eat chicken…
Somehow, that grief does not totally overwhelm me, four years out.
I can see it, I can hold it as a familiar thing, like a bird with a broken wing that will never fly again. I can long to be swept away on the air currents, while also being thankful that I can still glide very briefly from one end of the room to another.
It’s here, always. I can put my hand over my heart and feel it.
Just as I can still feel the raw nerve pain in my right foot on a bad day, but I can generally walk and get around my daily life without too many issues.
I’m not a warrior. I’m not stronger than others, or braver, or wiser. I am none of those things.
I’m just making do the best I can with the hike I’ve been given, trying to focus on the small details that make it feel like it’s still worth being here. And feeling thankful that maybe I already had some vaguely useful tools in my toolbox to manage it with.
Happy Covidversary to me.
This is beautiful and powerful. Thank you so much. Xx