Hi there,
On the 31st of December, I was in bed by 10PM (I will admit that’s not unusual for me😇). My head was throbbing, I was sweating with fever and coughing like a seal. A few days later, my doctor diagnosed me with long covid, telling me that I might feel like this for months, even years.
Happy 2023…😭
While my Linkedin feed filled up with everyone’s great ambitions for the new year, I was scheduling naps in my calendar, and organizing a small but mighty army of helpers for kids, cooking and other chores.
January is never the most cheerful time of the year for me, but this really hit me hard. I have a bit of an unhealthy ‘independent woman’ attitude that make it very hard for me to surrender to the situation and accept help. This caused a situation where even my three-year-old would look at me at a worried face during dinner, asking me if I skipped my nap yet again 🙈
So in order not to burden my toddler with the impossible task of raising me into a responsible adult, I decided to take my condition more seriously, and to see it as a learning opportunity (always a good strategy for a coaching nerd).
The ironic thing about long covid is that any time you overexert yourself (in my case, trying to go through a day without napping, or taking two flights of stairs in one go), the time it takes to recover becomes longer. So the only way out for me was to let go of my independent woman story, and accept that I, like all humans, am not invincible.
So I took the naps, accepted my husband’s, friends’ and family’s help, took my vitamins, drank loads of ginger tea with honey, received a beautiful healing meditation from a friend and a super relaxing massage by another friend and …. dare I say it: I feel so much better!
I still take it slower than I would like, but there’s a part of me that’s really enjoying this more gentle approach. Who knows, the sneaky virus might have taught me a lesson for life.
Reflecting on it now, I realize that this learner’s attitude is what helps me get through many difficult situations (such as my bore-out, as I share in this video). I always believe there is some lesson to learn, and even though I don’t always know what the lesson will be, just trusting that there is a lesson makes the situation a lot lighter.
What helps you in difficult times? I’d love to hear from you!
