To Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

My mind doesn’t seem to work the way it used to. I had COVID-19 in March 2020, and I have Long Covid. I have some of the myriad of Long Covid symptoms: brain fog, tinnitus, reduced ability for physical exertion (before Covid I was regularly running 5 and 10k’s, after I had it, I couldn’t run a mile), fatigue (I can easily sleep 10-12 hours a day now, and still wake up feeling tired.) Most disturbingly, after a year and a half, these symptoms have not seemed to improve.

The other night, I had a strong emotional response and an insight regarding how I’m functioning now versus how I used to be able to function. Janel and I were watching “For All Mankind.” In the episode we were watching Molly Cobb—who is a pilot and astronaut—is struggling to deal with the fact that she is losing her eyesight, and that without sufficiently good eyesight she will no longer be able to fly. Struggling with the fact that being a pilot and an astronaut is core to how she views herself, and that she doesn’t see a way to have a meaningful life when she can’t be what she was anymore.

In the show, Molly goes so far as to consider spending a large amount of money on a treatment from a charlatan in a desperate last attempt to save her eyesight—and as she sees it, the only life worth living for Molly Cobb. In the end (of course?), she chooses not to do that, and to instead start the work of figuring out how to have a meaningful life as the Molly Cobb she is and will become, not the Molly Cobb she was.

For me, watching Molly’s struggle triggered one of those sudden shifts in perspective, where I could suddenly think about my life in a fundamentally different way. It hit me like a hammer blow; my chest and throat tightened up, and I started crying. I am like Molly; my mind and my intellectual capabilities aren’t what they were before Covid, and after a year and a half it seems likely that they never will be again. I need to stop looking and trying to go backward, and figure out what I am now, and what I will become in the future. To work at being more at peace with who and what I am now. To allow that to be enough.