How to Heal

Surprisingly, uncomplicated, not surprisingly, difficult to heed

This weekend, Saturday to be exact, was the most back to normal me I’ve felt in the past two weeks. It was a wild ride with this go round of Covid, as I think I mentioned in my previous post. But that post was written when the ride was only just beginning. Once the fever broke and the typical symptoms of the virus began to subside, the second act began.

I’d mentioned in that previous post that it felt like every past injury or illness I’ve ever had were present alongside the virus. In the second act, each of these conditions or symptoms took something of a solo encore appearance before returning to the shadows and wings of the stage that apparently is my body, since I’m going with this metaphor to describe it. Each encore appearance lasting 24-48 hours before stepping aside to allow the next one to take center stage.

It’s difficult to explain how different and yet similar some of these symptoms are from one illness to the other. The Lyme disease flare, the EDS flare, the dysautonomia flare, the mastocytosis flare, the mold exposure symptoms. There is a genetic link that makes me susceptible to them all. And they all still reside in my body, making it very hard to discern at times which is causing what thing, but during that last week, it was like they politely took turns having their way with me.

Each day was pretty easy to identify which it was, as my memories of the season of first appearance in my life returned along with the physical symptoms. In spite of the fact that I still deal with these illnesses on an ongoing chronic basis, it was pretty clear that it was the covid virus stirring each up, until the last few days when I found myself inexplicably descending into one of the darkest bouts of depression I’ve been in for a long while.

Like the physical illnesses, memories of the season when depression dominated my life returned, but it wasn’t until I woke in the wee hours of the night, that it occurred to me that maybe covid had stirred this up too. Thank god I recognized that. It gave me the ability to just hang on through it and sure enough, 48 hours later, my regular levels of optimistic melancholy returned. (That sentence is evidence as to why we need laughing emojis.)

Somehow during it all, I managed to write a poem and posted it on Instagram. It received the most love of just about anything I’ve ever posted there, telling me just how deeply it resonated for so many of you. I wrote it in the same way that I write most of my poems, which is to say I don’t really know how I wrote it. It just sort of came to me fully formed, beginning with that first line. Sort of.

I woke up that morning starving, which is not my usual morning state. While I waited for the coffee to brew, I managed to climb my way up the stairs to my studio, piecing together snippets of all the fodder and bits laying around the work table, longing to do something creative; something that felt more human then laying in bed reading or watching endless hours of TV.

I was only up there for about twenty minutes before my legs felt thick as tree stumps being pressed into the ground by my suddenly very heavy body and I knew I needed to go back downstairs and rest. “Rest when your legs can no longer hold the weight of your body” popped into my head as soon as my head hit the pillow, and when I grabbed my notebook to write, it came out fully formed:

When your body wakes up hungry,
feed it.
and when it wants to sleep,
sleep.
and when you hear just one line
for a poem,
a really good line,
write it down.
even if it has no context,
especially if it has no context.
don’t try to give it meaning,
wait for it to speak.
Meanwhile,
rest when your legs can
no longer hold the weight of your body.
read a good book.
not one that presses you to
think,
but one that takes you on a journey
and causes you to linger
over someone else’s story
and helps you to see
beyond your own window
and know that you are
not alone.
This is the way
we heal the world.
—Crystal Marie

That last line didn’t make it to the Instagram post, at least not the last two words, simply because there is no way to format on the platform and the strikethrough was vital to the intent.

This is the way we heal the world though. Truly, wouldn’t you agree?

To listen deeply to our own needs and heed what our body is telling us in the micro of our own being is to listen to the needs of others and heed what it needs in the macro of the body that is all of humanity.

Full of viruses, the human race. Flaring endlessly through cycles of what ails it. Sometimes raging all at once, and other times very distinctly telling us when one systemic issue is foundational to it all.

Surprisingly uncomplicated, to heal it is to listen to it, to give it the love, compassion, acceptance, belonging it needs. Not surprisingly, difficult to heed when we’ve been ignoring the pain it is in for so long.

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I’ll be publishing the changes I intend to make with the membership tiers for subscribers soon. I’ve formulated a plan that I think will work, you know, after listening deeply and giving myself the space to breathe.

Meanwhile, thanks so much for all the responses to my last post, whether privately sent or added to the discussion in the comments. Kind of surprised me, to be honest, how much it seemed to resonate with so many of you. I just wanted you to know how much it mattered to me. And you. How much you each matter too.