August 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 4

My body was shaking; my heart was racing, my nervous system fluttering so hard I couldn’t find sleep, and for a moment I felt I couldn’t fight anymore. I swung my legs out of bed to feel my feet on the ground, hoping that the shaking would subside, that the fear would vanish. When was this going to end? When would these symptoms stabilize, and when would I find my strength again? Everything seemed to be cascading in the wrong direction: sleepless nights, unrelenting anxiety, a gag reflex making eating impossible, and debilitating fatigue. A good day was one where I managed to see my kids off to school and shower before they returned.

This began in January of 2022 when I tested positive for covid. I intentionally don’t capitalize covid because it has already demanded enough attention. My husband was forced to take time off from work to do the things that I could no longer do: driving our two children to school, showing up for their extracurriculars, holding the days together as best he could. I spent whatever strength I had acting “normal enough” to get two kids out the door in the morning. After they left, I would use the rest of the day to recover to be able to greet them in the evening with a semblance of mom energy.

If any of this sounds familiar, then let me say the thing I most needed to hear back then: you are not alone.

I understand the many challenges of living with long covid. I lived with this mysterious illness for years: the debilitating exhaustion, the inexplicable numbness in my fingers, lurking fears of never returning to wellness, the insidious symptoms that would come and go like changing tides. The path of recovery is non-linear and confusing. More than once I thought, I’m through it, only to wake the next day plagued with symptoms. There is an unspoken vulnerability in not knowing when it will end, whether recovery is even possible, or how to feel better. Sometimes I found myself asking, am I somehow making this up? How could this still be happening weeks, months, years later? Our paths may vary in symptoms and degree, but we can meet each other in the same uncertainty.

I want you to know you are not alone, even when it feels like you are.

Your friends and family may not understand how hard it is. Sometimes they disappoint; sometimes they disappear altogether. I was always someone who felt I had the good fortune of a close-knit inner circle. But when I got hit with long covid and was forced into quiet, when reaching out became too much strain on the little energy I had, my close friends fell silent too. It was unexpected, and none of it made sense. Over these years, I have come to understand it less as abandonment and more as divergence. I think, in the end, I simply grew in a different direction. That understanding doesn’t erase the loss or hurt, but it allows me to hold it more gently.

With long covid comes grief, grieving the life you had, your physical strength, the exercise that steadied you, the friendships that quietly thinned, the work that gave your days their shape. And whatever else it took from you that only you can name.

But with all this loss come seedlings of growth. A quiet, unrelenting whisper of a strength you didn’t know you had. A deeper discovery of yourself. An unearthing of patience. A call to love and nurture yourself unconditionally, when so many unwanted conditions surround you.

Please remember that you are not alone, even when loneliness strikes hard.

Some people may even say, “You look so great, do you really feel unwell?” A friend said something like that to me about two years in, and it left me feeling misunderstood, like somehow my suffering wasn’t real. That is the strange burden of chronic illness. Our society is built on a wellness expectation of binary outcomes: you get sick and recover, or you get sick and die. Those of us who live with chronic illness know there is a third outcome, the one where each day you simply do the best you can. Where you might look well but feel brittle inside: quivery, achy, or inexplicably, debilitatingly fatigued. Where the doctor’s melatonin and magnesium recommendations leave the sleepless nights untouched, and where an anxiety so rooted in your body leaves you unsure of how to dislodge it.

My journey with long covid is not an opportunity I would have chosen, but it’s one that became rich with learning once I was willing to look. It has cultivated a deeper compassion for myself and for others that I never knew I had. I can’t promise you when it will end, but I can promise you that the experience offers a chance to know yourself more deeply than you did before.

When Western medicine had no answers for me, I went looking elsewhere, navigating a path of wisdom teachers, an acupuncturist, meditation, and an herbalist. I followed the breadcrumbs, cobbling a path back to wellness. I even spoke with a beautiful intuitive who provided the hope and vision of my wellness when I couldn’t access that vision myself. And slowly, carefully, I nurtured a growing sense of connection to something larger than myself. I don’t fully have language for that last part, but somewhere in the searching I began to feel an interconnectedness I hadn’t felt before, a sense that all of this, the suffering included, was part of some larger unfolding I wasn’t meant to control.

I am in my early fifties, and I’ll be honest: it’s hard to know anymore what changed because of the illness and what changed simply because of age, or perimenopause, or time. But I know I am changed. The vulnerability of those years made me more forgiving of everyone, more empathetic toward people whose actions I don’t understand. It expanded my own sense of self and revealed a strength I hadn’t known was there. Today I would call myself recovered. Recovered, but forever changed.

Whatever chronic illness you may be navigating, hold yourself steady and tenderly through the tumultuous waters. Eventually you might discover a new sense of aliveness, a new way of being alone in your symptoms without giving loneliness a place to live. You might find a vitality of spirit that emerges against all odds. And at some point your grief may alchemize into something as simple as gratitude, gratitude for each day the sun rises and your heart continues to beat. You will look around, and despite all the heartache and change, you will breathe deeply, hold yourself in love, and know that you are not alone.

This piece is dedicated to all long covid survivors.