In the beginning of September, I awoke from what I’ve been calling a two-month fugue state—yes, I learned the term from Breaking Bad. I was conscious and doing things, but I swear to God the only thing I could talk or think about was how tired I was. I was unmotivated, bored and dying of everything, well, at least according to my WebMD research. When I ventured into Manhattan, riding the subway for the first time in six months, to see my doctor, I prepared for a thyroid diagnosis at best and something worse at, well, worse.
Yet, as I rattled off my symptoms, the look in my doctor’s eyes was less “get this lady to the hospital!” and more “can my patients please stop Googling symptoms?” Everything I was concerned about, she proved me wrong. “You’re extremely healthy,” she said. Welp, I was just going to have to be one of those desperate case studies on Mystery Diagnosis. Maybe they’d name my extremely rare disease after me!
Bleak, I know. With some perspective, I see how I scared I was to admit to myself that I was probably depressed—so scared that I magically thunk myself into a diagnostic tailspin that had me wishing I could cure this “other medical issue” with the accompanying prescription. Easy. But leaving my doctor’s office, something clicked. I had been so anxious to head into the city that I had trouble sleeping the night before. Before Covid, I was almost never home. I would jump from work to a coffee meeting to dinner to a show, subway hopping and easily amassing those 10,000 daily steps. Up until now, I hadn’t let myself quantify—in dinners, subway cars, steps—just how drastically my life had changed in six months such that one appointment could send me into a panic.
I am one of the lucky ones in this pandemic, but it has also changed me, and I’ve had to learn to care for this new, frightened version of myself I barely recognize. So, in addition to seeking mental health treatment, these are some ways that have been helping me take on Covid life, one day at a time...