Hello friends,

I know we’re already a week into February but I do just want to say ‘Happy February’ because honestly? The thrill that it is no longer January has not yet warn off. I hope as the days and weeks move forward, you are finding yourself able to move forward — with hope, with bravery, with whatever it is you might need to reach inside yourself to find right now, too. 

I’ve been writing on the internet since I was 16 and have adopted a copious amount of comfort when it comes to sharing hard things, but this? I can’t deny it feels scary and I feel vulnerable. 


Let's get straight to it...
 

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When I think about change and how much of it I have acquired in the last year, I dig my fingers into my palms and remark that I’ve become a cat person who wears jeans. Which is a kind of inside joke to say: radically so. Which is a kind of lighthearted comment that bypasses the depth of that change, the origins of that change — that which feels terrifying, too large to quite pin down.

A year ago I found myself with a severe case of heatstroke after burning the entire back of my body from the waist down. There were a good few moments, lathered in aloe vera, I considered myself to be dying. A succumbing to further rallied by my clutching hold of the toilet bowl in the middle of a power cut and the fact I was 7,000 miles from home. My own requiem performed in a hallucinatory video I recorded of myself asking if anybody knew of a doctor in Indonesia (please never ask to see such footage). And then, after 48hrs of being really really sick, I miraculously started to feel better. I began to reintroduce myself to the streets of Ubud. I began to eat foods that were not pot noodles from the corner shop next door. I began to visit galleries and take myself on excursions to temples. I got better and so the story of the heatstroke I caught whilst surfing the waves of Canggu (trying to) could be tucked away as an anecdote I’d later be able to relay as a thing that happened that one time. Case closed.

Except, that wasn’t the end of the story and neither does the story have an end, now.

Last February I visited my doctor because something was very not right. I never mentioned my sunburn in that first consultation because its traces had already faded on the surface of my skin, because it felt silly in the presence of a dizziness that was rendering me unable to stand. And the thick of it, for myself of last year, is this: it will be months and months of various prognosis, various medications, various tests. There will be a whole ass pandemic and a low-level sneaking anxiety that it could very well be Covid. Except that it’s very much not. Until you wake up one day and it’s been a whole year of being really not very well at all. 

There is a specific kind of loneliness in friends thinking your busyness is a symptom of your success and not that you’re playing catch-up to the work you’re behind on from having more sick days than not.

There is a specific kind of frustration in wanting to create and be ambitious and achieve and your body having absolutely none of it. 

There is a specific kind of heartbreak in not having the energy for your own hurt; a specific kind of failure felt to being unable to hold onto the girl he loved.

There is a specific kind of brokenness you feel to being on the phone to the hospital multiple times a week; a specific kind of guilt you feel to being on the phone to the hospital multiple times a week when there is a global pandemic.  

Dehydration, as it would turn out, is a rather dangerous thing. My neurologist believes that the extreme dehydration caused by my heatstroke rewired my brain. At its most convenient, it rewired my brain so that medication I took beforehand, without fuss, now comes with a side plate of debilitating nausea. It rewired my brain so that eating foods I loved before now has an effect I can only liken to gasoline burning rampant inside my skull — a feeling that does not shift for an entire week. At its least convenient, the pain is so bad I consider myself to be once again dying. My requiem this time performed as tears for what I do not have words for. It rewired my brain to, in effect, not function as it had; as it should. 

My mother once had heatstroke and a non-tea drinker her whole life, found upon recovery, that all she wanted was to drink tea. Cups and cups of it. She got PG Tips, I got chronic pain. 

This is a very weird thing for me to write because it's been the elephant in the room, albiet a room I've stood in alone, for so long. I'm suspicious of my clutching hold of this narrative I've been given; one that seems to fit, because there is much still to wade through. If you went through my newsletter archive of the last year with a fine-tooth comb I’m sure there are some allusions to my not being very well but I also think you’d have to be looking for it.

I’ve joked my way through phrases like ‘brain fog’ and ‘pandemic brain’ — as we all have — which completely obliterated any of the candour that lies beneath itself. 

But also, up until last month I still had little explanation to what was happening to me, I still had no idea what was wrong. I had no idea any of this could be linked to the heatstroke, I had no idea why I was hardly functioning at all.

But also because the days have been spent knelt at the altar of its force, in grieving what it’s taken and scrambling to preserve what it hasn’t, in trying-to-just-get-through-the-days.

But also because I didn’t have the words— for myself or for anyone.

And now? Everything is still hinged on a big maybe. I will never know if all the personality quirks and fluctuating pathologies I’ve adopted in the last year are a symptom of my neurological condition, the effects of the pandemic or because simply, people change. I suspect it’s a mixture of all three.

I probably can’t get my old brain back in much of the same way we cannot get this lost year back.

Our physical lives, once this has all been said and done, will revert to their old freedoms, their old behaviours, their old socialisations. But our emotional lives will not revert to their old selves. We will remain changed in the wake of what we have been through — and a little bit scarred, too.

My brain too, might (if the treatment goes to plan) revert to its old physiology, but emotionally there’s no going back for me. 

That is the reality I must succumb to, now.
 

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P.S. I just also want to make a quick point of saying I haven’t known kindness like the kindness of healthcare workers. The nurse who sat with me as I cried in hospital on New Year’s Eve when she could’ve been doing a million other things. The other nurse who, went out of her way to put a prescription through for me when it wasn’t at all in her jurisdiction. My favourite nurse who tells me about all her cats when she takes my blood. My doctor who is the gentlest man I have ever known. My counsellor who always reassures me that I am not broken. It is not lost on me that healthcare workers are most exposed to humanity’s cruelty and the most abandoned by this government’s inhumanity, and yet still have room for kindness. It is not lost on me.

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As always, I love to hear from you. If you liked today’s newsletter, want to carry on the conversation or have any thoughts or feedback at all, do hit reply. Thanks for reading x