Two Things are True

Those of you who read my last post will know I really didn’t mind the first week of COVID. I threw all of my energy into resting and recovering, and by about the fifth day, I noticed little glimpses of feeling like myself again.

The following week, however, I started work for the year, and discovered how much healing my brain had yet to do, and how much I actually hated the insufferably chipper version of me who’d written that previous post.

On the morning of my first day of work, I decided to leave my laptop at home, both to lighten the weight of my bag (the walk from the train station to the office would be my first attempt at a hill post-COVID) and to prevent myself from even thinking about starting any of the admin tasks on my to-do list. It was also a hot day, and so, given I’d switched my three clients to Telehealth and therefore knew that only my top half would be visible, I peeled off my black work pants and chose some shorts instead.

I made it to my therapy room with my light bag and short shorts feeling like a fucking genius for figuring out how to stay cool and professional simultaneously, especially on my first day of work for the year AND after having COVID, and that’s when I realised that actually my laptop was not just handy for admin or bag-lightening but also kind of crucial for the back-to-back Telehealth sessions I had planned.

I had a small and intense panic before the few working neurons in my brain came up with a solution: I could use my phone’s camera instead! Done.

But there was nowhere on the desk I could rest my phone that wouldn’t involve clients looking directly up my nostrils, and I could not imagine having to hold it in front of my face for three hours straight, and so I moved the phone over to a pot plant, where, if I leaned it carefully against the branch of my room’s ficus in the one section where the leaves opened up enough to see through, and if I then rearranged the furniture so I could sit in a lower chair, the camera sat at exactly the right height for my face. Done!

But that’s when I realised that wearing long pants was actually kind of crucial for Telehealth sessions with no desk involved if I didn’t want my clients thinking for even a microsecond about my thighs, which, I now saw, were a prominent feature of the view my phone was getting from its pot plant perch.

At this point I had two minutes remaining before my first client was due to arrive online, and so I pushed the chair as close to the pot plant as it would go with my legs squished off to the side, and then I twisted towards the camera and completed my first two sessions in this awkward position, with my iPad over my lap as a note-taking device/modesty cover.

Then my phone battery threatened to die and so I had to switch back to the desk for my last client, this time using my iPad for its camera and paper and pen for notes.

Friends, I cannot (be bothered to) express how relieved I was when my day finally ended.

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For the last week or so I’ve been at the killer-headache stage of COVID, which has continued for much longer and hurt much more than last time I had it. And this time I have a bonus symptom: a weird, pain-adjacent feeling in my teeth and gums, kind of like when you bite into something too cold or sour, that I currently feel only when walking on hard surfaces, or if I jog – every time my heel hits the ground, it feels like my teeth are jangling around, and my gums are struggling to hold onto them. It’s deeply unpleasant.

Hazel and I started our Couch to 5K program a couple of days before I got sick; we haven’t been back out since.

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Last week, I was grumpy and snappy and sarcastic. I kept wondering why I couldn’t just return to the way I’d felt the week before: calm, accepting, focused on the good things rather than the hard. Why had I switched so suddenly from fine to not?

When I went to see my new psychologist, Emily, I intended to ignore all of this and to focus instead on how I struggle to say the things I need to say and then feel resentful that people won’t simply read my mind, but when she asked how I’d been, I immediately started crying. I cried about the summery weeks COVID had stolen from me: the swims I didn’t get to swim, the soccer I wasn’t able to play, the Folk Festival dancing I stayed seated for because of my weird, sore teeth, and my tired, sore lungs.

And then I cried because now COVID was stealing my precious psychology session time, and all of this could have been avoided had two sick people decided to stay home from a New Years Eve party rather than showing up and infecting a bunch of us.*

‘Anyway!’ I said eventually, changing the subject; that was enough crying for now. I still had holidays left and was feeling better every day, I hadn’t been hospitalised with COVID like my friend had been, and also people all over the world were suffering far more than me, etc., etc.!

But Emily interrupted, and asked me just to pause. To feel my feet on the floor, and my back and bottom against my chair. To notice my breath. Then she asked me to direct my attention inwards and check if there were any parts who needed me to show up for them in that moment.

The Sad was right there, sitting heavily on my heart. Desperate for my attention and patience and compassion.

I’d like to say that I immediately offered Sad all of those things. There were so many parts resisting it, though – the Intellectualiser part speeding ahead and guessing at what Sad might say so we could quickly fix the problem/s without ever having to listen to her; the Nervous part who’s not yet convinced Emily’s someone I can trust with my big feelings – and we ran out of time.

When Emily asked at the end of the session what my therapy goal for the year was, I told her that I should probably say it was to work towards wanting to spend time with Sad, and with all the other feelings I relentlessly avoid. I don’t want it yet, but I want to want it.

And, since that session, I’ve also realised this: I want to remember that it’s possible for all of my feelings to coexist; just because I feel grumpy doesn’t mean that all of my doing-fine parts have disappeared forever. Just because I feel fine doesn’t mean that a part of me is not also sad.

I seem to keep worrying that I’m all one thing or the other, when actually I’m made up of a multitude of parts, all of whom have good intentions for me, all of whom are welcome.

I know this, but I want to believe it.

(If only so that I feel like less of a hypocrite when I ask my clients to believe it too.)

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* More than enough time has now passed for us to learn that if you have cold symptoms, stay home (and then take good care of the parts of you who feel disappointed).