Inspired by someone online I decided to create a word cloud of my Corona Chronicles. If you’re not familiar with the term: a word cloud is a picture consisting of the most frequently used words in a text. Check out my word cloud above!

I’m happy that this picture isn’t filled with a lot of terrible and negative words because it feels important for me to write positively. I try to write about my experience with Long Covid in a way that hopefully is informative and with a bit of luck also of help and/or inspirational to someone else. However, lately I have found this a bit more difficult to be honest. Here is why:

I feel like I’ve lost my acceptance.

If you’ve followed this blog you might remember that I wrote about accepting Long Covid back in week 19? I remember I could really connect in my body to this deep feeling of acceptance for my situation at that time. Well, 3 months have passed since then and I have to admit: today I am kicking hard against my current situation. I hate waking up in the middle of the night feeling the covid-waves through my body. It’s difficult to describe how this feels but it involves sweating, a beating heart and a rush of anxiety. I hate not having the energy to work fulltime. I hate still having a tight chest and a body that feels out of balance with different energies running all over the place. But most of all: I hate the fact that I’m fighting it all. Because in my mind, I KNOW better!? So in a way I feel that I’m constantly fighting with myself which, to be honest, is pretty exhausting. As I wrote before, I know that I cannot think my way into being. It doesn’t matter how much I understand in my head about what I ‘should’ do (which is fully accepting the fact that I’m still not 100% recovered). If my body isn’t involved in that understanding, it remains shallow somehow and it won’t result in true acceptance and a feeling of inner calmness. As I said, I know all this, but still I can’t seem to put it into practice these days.

So here I go around my days, increasingly often feeling frustrated, sad or numb. It’s not a terribly nice way of being I can tell you! The expression pulling yourself up by your bootstraps comes to mind as I write this. I feel like I would need to do this but somehow can’t muster up the energy for it these days. Can’t be bothered. I’ve done it so many times already, for months on end, and now I’m just fed up for the moment.

See what I’m doing here? I’ve created my own hole and in a weird way it’s comfortable being down here because I don’t have to take any responsibility and can just wallow. I believe some people live their entire lives down inside their holes. But then I look a bit closer at my word cloud and I see words such as alive, living, aware, writing, time, moment, experience, choose and know. If I would take each of these words and make a new sentence with them, it would look like this:

Covid-19 didn’t kill me, I’m still alive!
Living is such a gift.
I am aware of my thoughts, feelings and the sensations in my body.
Writing about my experience gives me so much joy.
Time is such a weird phenomenon.
Life happens exactly at this moment, not in the past and not in the future.
The experience of Long Covid is life-changing for me.
I am not a victim, I can choose my way of relating to the present moment every hour and minute of each day.
I know that all wisdom resides in me, I just have to remember.

And look at that! By using my own most frequently used words in new sentences, I actually feel something shifting inside me. I can tidy up down in my messy hole for now (I’m sure I’ll visit it again) and crawl out of it, into some sunshine. Instantly I feel my body relaxing and realize, once again, how incredibly fortunate I am to still be alive. To be able to breathe. To have so much loving support around me. To laugh with friends. To eat good food. And to have a body that is recovering, it just needs more time.

So that’s what I’m going to give it, again: time. Time to further heal. And time to integrate everything that’s happened for the past 31 weeks.  

I found a quote about time from the writer Sam Levenson that I will take with me. Here it is:

Don’t watch the clock;
do what it does.
Keep going.

Thank you for reading! ♥

Photo: made on woordwolk.nl

This writing is part of what I call my Corona Chronicles. On this page you can find an overview of my stories since March 2020.