Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Right now someone is packing for a research trip to Antarctica. Swimming with dolphins. Having their first dance.
Someone is falling in love on a bridge in Venice. Ziplining off a treetop platform. Spelunking in a cave in near total darkness.
Someone’s life disappears into the shadows of another’s big moment.
When the unit of measure plucked from the shelf, someone always falls short.
Continue reading “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”
Halfway up the road to the lake, the ground caved in. It was our first summer running the YMCA summer camp in the mountains of Colorado. The new culvert system our regional Y had installed at a cost of $900K had not even had its first birthday.
Continue reading “Joint Force: Notes on Recovery Efforts”
The Visible app gives me a 2. Not the lowest score possible but It is a “Back to bed with you, Dear” kind of score. A score of knitted brows and wringing hands. Your body is out of balance today, the app tells me. You may want to plan a quieter day.
So I do. Even though the sun is up and the crepe myrtle blossoms are unfurling in the July heat, I down my morning meds and crawl back under the sheets. Eye mask, earplugs, more sleep. Fractured sleep disturbed by epic action-thriller fever dreams that shake my hold on reality, but sleep nonetheless. What else is there to do?
Continue reading “Know Happy: Notes on Voluntary Confinement”
Brain fog isn’t an official medical diagnosis; rather, it’s a colloquial term for a range of significant, persistent neurocognitive impairments that cause such symptoms as sluggish thinking, difficulty processing information, forgetfulness, and an inability to focus, pay attention, or concentrate. With Long COVID, the exact combination of brain fog symptoms varies from one person to the next.
– Kathy Katella, “Long COVID Brain Fog: What It Is and How to Manage It,” Yale Medicine News
Brainstorm, zero draft, morning pages, freewrite, stream of consciousness.
It has lots of names. I call mine WordSpring.
WordSpring has been my writing process for as long as I’ve been writing. At least 35 years. All I do is set a time or a number of pages and just let them spill out. The words flow free. My only job is to tap the source and, in the immortal words of Natalie Goldberg, “keep the hand moving.”
Occasionally I come to the spring with a theme in mind. Sometimes it’s just an opening and whatever emerges becomes the beginning of a project. More often than I care to admit, it’s all process and no outcome. Just the flow and whatever is called to the surface.
Continue reading “Running Dry: Notes on Writing through Brain Fog”
Stop the dancing/ We’ll share the whole pie/ The night sky/ And we can share the particles
– Cosmo Sheldrake, “Stop the Music”
If reading chronic illness memoirs has taught me anything, it’s that the surest way to get on a doctor’s bad side is to show up with a condition that doesn’t respond to treatment.
This is why I was so happy to find the Good Doctor.
This Good Doctor is a neurologist, a specialist in my HMO. When I first came to see her last year, she recognized I was talking about Long COVID without needing me to lead her to it. She ordered an MRI when no one else would, had me do cognitive testing, and got me into speech therapy. She’s one of the few specialists who has not let the treatment wasteland surrounding this illness scare her away from trying stuff.
Up until meeting her, chasing care was a game of musical chairs. The song comes on and there’s no choice but to get up and start scurrying for another place to land.
Continue reading “Stop the Music: Notes on Good Enough Care”
To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.
– Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom
Imagine falling into a well, tumbling deeper until you crash down into the ghostly ballroom of a towering manor. You come to in the middle of what appears to be a murder mystery party you definitely did not RSVP to.
Continue reading “Chronic Illness Storytime: Sick Lit Memoirs”
This last night of 2023 also happens to be my last evening off before returning to work. Three months of medical leave has been the best gift of the year. Because “going out” is no more than a fading memory from a distant land, I’m staying in tonight to answer five questions you haven’t asked yet (but maybe were going to) about Life with the Mystery Sick.
Continue reading “5 Answers to 5 Questions You Didn’t Ask”
46,000 of us on a Reddit sub. 60,000 on a private Facebook group. Tens (or even hundreds) of thousands still on Twitter despite the fallout from the buyout. Discord groups. Regional discussion boards. And circles absorbing circles as sub-types make homes in community with those suffering from ME/CFS, MCAS, and other illnesses.
These are just the collected few. We are always dealing with small clusters. Only 10-ish percent who get the virus will end up with post-viral syndrome. A percentage of those show symptoms severe enough, or enduring enough, to register among a baffled medical establishment as more than anxiety, aging, or “all your tests are normal, try meditation and drinking more water.”
Continue reading “See Here: Notes on Long COVID”
“Take Nothing for Granted”
Says the sticker inside locker 213.
It’s a sizeable sticker. Bigger than “Deposit Quarter, Take Key.” More insistent than “Be responsible! Always lock your locker!” It hangs there at a cocky angle. Shabby, smug, sure of itself. Shredded at the edges, about five and a half feet off the ground (eye level for some of us). The size just shy of a bumper sticker. An iconoclast. A poseur. Trying to be something different. To proselytize from unlikely, and unavoidable, public soap boxes. Not truck bumpers, no. Instead, utility poles. Bathroom stalls. Park benches. Locker rooms.
Continue reading “Sticker Shock”
Some people have spiritual journeys. Like the woman at the pool today. She gave me a copy of her book, the one she’s self-published about her awakening. Praise and bible verses sing their glory from the pages. She told me Satan still tempts her sometimes.
I’m going to have to read this because we’re neighbors. We need each other more than I need the security of my convictions. I’ll learn about her journey. No matter how indirect its impact on my life, a person’s story is a big deal. Reading a slice of it is a small task.
Lately, my journey has strayed far from the spiritual. I’ve gone on a physical detour, as if I’ve stumbled upon some hidden hatch and tripped into my own body. I wander through this wondrous machine, in awe of what I’m witnessing. Connections! Understanding! Everyone needs to hear about this transformation — You! Yes, you! — because it could be this good for you too! Really! This one simple set of practices could give you back life you didn’t even know you’d lost!
Because who doesn’t love hearing yet another opinion about how to improve oneself?
Shannon E. Williams 