Covid Lessons

How being ill has helped me start to surrender

Last week, for the first time, I tested positive with Covid. I know - I’m not quite sure how I’ve escaped it until now either, but last week was my time and so I allowed it to take over.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I know I got away with it lightly. The first couple of days I didn’t feel too bad. A slight head cold and aching body, followed by a sore throat and mild heart palpitations (not going to lie - these freaked me out a bit.) By day three however, my brain just decided to switch off.

It wasn’t unpleasant, in fact, it wasn’t anything. It was a brain fog like I’ve never known. I have quite bad brain fog currently - I’m blaming it on the menopause although to be honest I’ve always had a vague foggy-ness (I’m a Piscean dreamer), but Covid fog was a different level.

I quite liked it.

My view for about 5 days…

I’m not sure if it’s because I allowed myself to completely surrender to it, or whether I even had a choice, but for a few days, I felt free. Free from the intrusive thoughts, the negative emotions, the overthinking, the guilt, the questions, the internal monologue, all of it.

I used to numb my brain with alcohol. I’m not sure if it was a conscious choice or purely habit, but when I felt any kind of emotion that was too big, I reached for the booze. Whether it was to celebrate or commiserate or communicate, alcohol had to be involved. I loved the feeling after the first glass of wine, the fuzzy numbness that took over my brain and just allowed all the emotions to slow down and go to sleep for a while. I was an addict.

After becoming sober over five and a half years ago, I have continuously said that the actual giving up of booze is the easy bit. The part I struggle with is the lack of silence that my emotions allow me.

I’m grateful I am an emotional person; I’ve learnt to become friends with my hyper sensitivities, but I do not love the overthinking that plagues me daily. My brain can be very cruel to me and battling that is exhausting.

So, it was a relief when it fell silent for a few days.

What was curious for me is that even though the thoughts had faded into the background, I still had the capacity to observe that this was happening. It wasn’t a total blackout, but a dimming down. I was able to be separate from my thoughts because my bodily feelings had become numb.

I’m learning that thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin. In ‘Letting Go - The Pathway of Surrender’ by David R Hawkins, he writes;

“It is not thoughts or facts that are painful but the feelings that accompany them… It is the accumulated pressure of feelings that causes thoughts. One feeling, for instance, can create literally thousands of thoughts over a period of time.”

My body literally switching off for a few days allowed my brain to do just that. Switch off completely. Without guilt, without expectation, without any questioning whatsoever.

I guess the only other time that this can happen besides a physical illness, is an emotional breakdown so I am grateful I have never been in that place. I am lucky that my physical symptoms were pretty mild and I am lucky I was able to continue to take care of myself. It was just kind of nice to sleep a lot and have that disconnection from the outside world and the negative thoughts that I have been carrying recently.

As part of my therapy practice, I have been working on managing these thoughts by going back to the original reason for triggering those initial emotions, and what I made that mean at the time. It’s a process I don’t find easy, but by exploring the feelings properly I can start to understand why those destructive thoughts are there, and start to question their credibility.

Despite being an emotional person, I do struggle to name the feeling and where it came from. I tend to blame and shame myself which I know isn’t useful. I am scared of confronting my shadows. I am guilty of staying in what I like to call ‘the warm shitty place’ because I know despite it being full of sadness, it is also comfortable because it is what I know, and I am afraid of the unknown. I have been staying small because of that fear. But I am bringing all of this into the fore and doing my best to be honest with myself about how I am responsible for staying in that place. And figuring out how to change it.

I forget, a lot of the time, that growth is an ongoing process. I forget that we live a million different lives in this one body. I forget that staying still is a curse that I don’t want to have.

When I look back at old Instagram posts of mine from just a couple of years ago I am envious of who I was back then. I see the woman I want to be, I see her living in the way I want to, and I read her wisdom and I learn from it. I sense her passion and her lust for life. I wonder why I seem to be going backwards. But I know that she was also racked with guilt, was trying to figure shit out, was doing her best not to stay small. She is me and I am her, and I am always changing. I have become stuck trying to find the answers when all I really want is to surrender all of it. I am blaming and shaming myself when I don’t need to. My ruminating has gotten out of hand.

Sharon Blackie’s Substack post this morning was a great reminder. It contained a whole host of wisdom which I highly recommend you absorb, but this jumped out to me;

“Transformation is part of life, and when we stop transforming, we stop fully living. Knowing that doesn’t make the hard times easier, but it gives them meaning.”

And so I remind myself that I can be different every day. To take the pressure off myself to be anything more than what I am. To stop placing so many expectations on myself and feeling guilty when I can’t do it all. It doesn’t really matter what I do, as long as I keep being honest with myself. I will do my best to let go of the feelings and thoughts that keep me stuck, and allow myself to unfurl over and over again.

And I remind myself that I am not my thoughts. I appreciate that all I have been doing is protecting myself in the only way I’ve known how. How clever and brilliant my beautiful brain is.

And I acknowledge that numbness is okay for a while, I am grateful for it, but for the same reasons I said goodbye to alcohol - I don’t want to stay there.