I was trying to find a way to write a follow up to my previous newsletter, especially after Jacqui Shine’s comment about generalizations. I was letting it percolate in my brain without much interest or deadline, mainly because I was so embarrassed. And then I got Covid.
I can’t tell if writing an essay after Covid is its own genre, but I wish it was. I want to hear how other people have reacted to the effects. I hadn’t had Covid before, but I was unsurprised to get it at this point — I’m currently working in an arena where actually being physically present is important. I was also unsurprised at how aggressive and holistically horrible it was. Even though I’ve had a million respiratory infections and problems before, just the Covid vaccine was so much more debilitating than a regular cold.
But I have been shocked at the mental effects, and the mental aftershocks I’ve had. Usually when I get sick, my mental presence is still very agile. I often have to remind myself to rest because my mind is so restless.
I feel like I have a kind of amnesia. I have little in the way of my old judgments and logic. But my body seems to remember and default to my personality without a problem. I feel supported by my body in a way where I trust myself fully, more fully than I’ve ever done before. It’s like I have my personality without my memories. It’s like my brain is a black box, so I don’t know what connections it’s making. I can’t trace the origins of every thought or theory or conclusion. Instead of following every emotional or psychological thread, I trust that it’ll make sense in time.
And yes, if that constant thinking sounds painful or exhausting, it is! I once described my ADHD as having three threads of thought pummeling through my head at once. But that’s not necessarily what I mean.
When I wanted to write my response to my previous newsletter, I wanted to explain that I wrote about ADHD that way because I felt like ADHD explained me. After all, since ADHD could explain many flaws in my self that I couldn’t understand or explain, I figured it also meant that I could use it to explain my strengths. That it could explain my whole personality, give me a reason to exist the way that I exist.
This is partly because I feel like my nature has been treated as inherently unnatural. That who I am demands explanation, because on its own it seems broken, disjointed, and suspicious.
And, honestly, it hasn’t just ADHD I’ve tried to use to explain why I am the way I am. It was like I was going through a grab bag of identities, and I was taking out each and every one because nothing could really explain why I was the way I was. Not the fact that I’m a woman, that I’m Indian American, that I’m a millennial, that I lived in one place and grew up in another. And not even the fact that I have ADHD. I’ve finally realized it’s nature, my nature that explains why I am the way I am. It’s the lack of explanation that is where my personality lives.
And, as if to fully prove my point, I got COVID and now I feel like the only thing I am is my personality. Despite all my logic and theorizing of who I am and who I could be, the ways that I could force myself into the shape of someone else, albeit very badly, I feel like COVID’s effect on my body has snapped me back into place.
While I know “brain fog” is a symptom of Covid, what I keep coming back to is the absolute wretched feeling I had when it came to the body aches (or body pains). When I got the initial vaccine, I got a horrible taste of this feeling, and it was enough for me to sit with a lot of anger I had with people I’d felt acted in unkind or inappropriate ways during the pandemic. It was enough for me to realize that I was actually angry, and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t.
When I got body aches this time, I longed for the comforts of people that weren’t in my life. I missed my grandma that gave the best hugs ever, that would cling to me and weep every time I left her. I missed the grandma who wasn’t technically related to me, who was my father’s “host mom” when he went to school in Canada. She was in the Canadian military for a majority of her life, didn’t have any children of her own and sent cold, stilted, compassionate letters that I cherished as an overly emotional and lonely child. I missed the stuffed loon1 I had when I was a kid. Listening to loon calls was weirdly helpful, though.
I also became very aware of my emotions. I know I seem obviously emotional in my writing…but so often I write as a way to control my emotions, to force them into recognizable shapes, to have some sense of myself as a logical, sensible person with good judgment, instead of the emotionally flighty person I worry that I am.
But it’s like my heart and my mind have switched places in the hierarchy. Now, my feelings are in charge. They are in charge and they are caring for me in a different way than my mind did. Now, to be clear I have been trying to get to this place for a while — but COVID has given me a stronger understanding of where I trip myself up.
I am no longer trying to find the magic, perfect words to communicate and connect. I am just trying to communicate and connect. By putting my feelings first, my personality gets to shine through. Instead of anticipating and preparing, I know I am prepared and ready for what comes my way. Instead of justifying my actions as I do them — like, I don’t know, spending way too much on Reddit posts about divorce — I tell a friend and let her ask me why I’m doing that. (That’s another newsletter, I suppose).
Instead of coming up with a catchy way to present this newsletter, or letting it fester and rot in my head, my friend Alicia asked me if I would write about my mental experience with Covid. So I did. Of course, I still wrote this on Friday to reread and edit today, but I’m surprised by just how much I want to keep.
I wonder if a lot of people have this problem — of forcing themselves to follow a kind of mental logic instead of letting their emotions guide them. I guess that’s what they mean when they talk about the problem of intellectualizing your feelings instead of just feeling them. The fear was letting myself be myself would lead to total destruction — of myself, my life, maybe my apartment if I didn’t pay attention when I was cooking. (I’ve only experienced two grease fires, I’ll have you know.) But there was something else there, too. Something not related to the ADHD. Something about my own personality not being good enough, not being trustworthy. As if something was broken inside me.
I talk about shame in this piece about ADHD. But I didn’t realize how much that shame was related to my life in 2019, when my personality was an arbitrary part of my life. I had the requirements (I figured) of what success looked like, and I was so desperately unhappy and empty. No wonder I had so much toxic shame — my life and my self were inherently incompatible. I was ignoring so much of my personality and its benefits.
Another element of Covid was me really sitting with my emotions. The day I got Covid, I got information where I learned that my feelings about a situation were correct, but the logic and understanding of what those feelings meant — what information they were signaling to me — was totally wrong. I got clear, concise evidence that my gut was right, and my mind was not. It broke open a gateway inside me, where I realized I had so many other gut feelings that I could trust over whatever logic I tried to put on them.
By sitting with my feelings when I had Covid, I felt remarkably in tune with elements of myself I had shoved down. There was just nothing to keep me from thinking of my grandmothers that I lost, nothing to keep me from seeing means and connections between how I operated within myself and how I didn’t. I was shocked at what I thought was true in 2019, because in 2023 holy Batman could I really fucking feel how wrong I was! Why was I friends with someone who made me cosmically uncomfortable all the time? Why did I think that couple — where one person was constantly deflecting to another, as if talking about a parent rather than a partner — was anything but toxic? Why didn’t I reach out to the people who clearly cared about me, who demonstrated they could be trusted over and over again? Why did I choose to be close to people that operated from the idea that I had no idea what I was doing?
Now, it seems, my body does. Completely. I mean, that is the one gift I’ll accept from getting Covid.2
It made me think of one part of Shine’s comment:
i’m also not sure i think emotional repression is as common as you imagine. not having access to some kinds of feelings is not the same as repressing them, and certainly certain kinds of emotions—sadness, irritability, anger—are not only not suppressed but dominant. they aren’t pleasant emotions, but they certainly aren’t repressed.
Repression, to me, operates like a submarine of an emotion — or perhaps, a whale. Say our consciousness is a deep ocean, with the ocean as our deeper subconscious. Anything on the surface of our conscious brain (or atop the water, where, say, a loon might sit), we are aware of. But below is much harder to access. The whale of repression is a gentle creature that can breach the surface sometimes. It’s when an emotional factor or understanding of ourselves is close to the surface, so close that it’s hard to pretend it doesn’t exist, that makes guest appearances when we least expect.
It feels so obvious to me now. But in 2019, I distinctly remember my confusion. I would act from my emotions, but my logic would be fiercely vicious in its disapproval. I couldn’t make sense of myself, and my inconsistency as a person made me deeply uncomfortable. Back then, there was no whale of repression. Instead, my problems were much less accessible, as Shine’s comment put it. They were deep shipwrecks of misunderstanding of myself, of toxic shame of not being understood and believing that was just how things would be forever. I think the other thing is, I just didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t have answers, and I couldn’t figure them out.
The last problem came from the fact that I just didn’t know which feelings were worth listening to. Part of the problem in 2019 — and much before that in my life as well — is that I wanted to trust myself, but I couldn’t tell what part of me to trust.
I couldn’t understand the logic of my feelings. But I just didn’t realize that feelings are their own useful logic.
I didn’t even know it was a stuffed loon until I saw this video a few months ago. It was not even necessarily a cute stuffed animal, it was extremely accurate. I loved it, but I was also pretty afraid of its red eyes.
I don’t think everyone has to think of getting Covid, or sick at all, as some kind of metaphor or gift of personal growth. It’s just a useful way of thinking when you get a lot of respiratory infections. I’m not just sick because of environmental factors like a shitty apartment or horrible allergies or my huge tonsils — I’m actually a Jane Austen heroine, and this is necessary for the plot.