Chronic illness can make it feel as though you are making little progress.
Not just health-wise, but in other aspects of your life as well.
Your peers are graduating, starting new jobs, settling down with long-term partners.
Your friends are exploring new hobbies, travelling, and having fun.
Your kids are growing up, and you miss some invaluable moments.
Your wife or husband is picking up the extra slack, you feel feeble as you haven’t the energy to help.
If you’re anything like myself, and the many people I speak to with Long Covid, you’re likely a chronic achiever, a lifelong doer of hard things.
You love challenges, you love to test your mettle, to develop your character.
If it weren’t for this illness you would be training for a marathon, rushing around to pick up the kids, developing your skills, travelling and broadening your horizons.
You see others doing just that. Up early, pounding the roads, hitting PB’s.
For me, I know intellectually that is so much easier.
What a privilege to only feel that ‘normal’ fatigue after a run.
What a delight to feel fried after a day of building your business.
What a privilege to worry only if you’ll have time to get your session in.
Even though I know that running a marathon pales in comparison to brain fog. That building a business is a gentle stroll compared with malaise.
I still feel this sense of shame at points, this guilt that I’m not challenging myself, bettering myself, in these more ‘conventional ways’.
I long to push myself physically, and challenge myself mentally.
If not for myself, but to also earn the respect of others.
This notion of earning your respect is so deeply embedded into everything an achiever does.
But as time has gone on, I have become more and more proud of how I deal with the challenges that every day faces.
For me, it is a bigger challenge to simply sit with myself and feel, than to push myself physically.
It is harder to learn to switch off, than stay glued to the computer.
What we experience every day, yet still continuing to show up where we can takes more grit, mettle and fortitude than a marathon & all-nighter combined.
My partner articulated this beautifully when I was having these doubts a little while back.
I confided that I was having these feelings of inadequacy at not pushing myself, not being able to work as hard as I wanted, and having to be ‘soft’ in certain areas of my life.
She told me, you are quite simply the strongest person I know with no comparison. The way you handle yourself in the face of all you’ve gone through is greater than any achievement or goal anyone could ever reach.
So I’d like to remind you that what you’re doing is enough.
If you’re sticking in there and still conduct yourself with dignity in a manner that you would be proud of, then that is enough.
Stay blessed x
Needed this right now. Thank you.
She’s so right. We were forced to be strong in ways that are completely against our nature. That’s a huge “achievement.”