I’ve got COVID.

It was bound to happen, and of course it did – with the seven of us at four different education institutions on the daily, one of us brought home COVID. The story said child tells is that there was a person at her school that was meant to be in isolation, but wasn’t – but validating that story is another matter entirely.

Today is Day 5, officially, for me… although our Patient Zero, the one who first got it, is now on Day 8 and feeling fine. The current rules in New Zealand state that positive cases and their households have to isolate for 7 days. Our whole household has it; the last to fall was the two year old, testing positive on Day 7 from the first positive test in the household.

The headaches I’m getting with this stupid virus are like no other. Part of the challenge is because it’s not a straightforward pain, or like any headache I’ve experienced before. The headache reminds me of when I was concussed. It’s not quite the same, but it’s that buzzing feeling that is similar. That, and the fact that I’m so quickly and easily fatigued also reminds me of the concussion. I’ve also said that I feel like I’m concussed and pregnant all at once… because the other lingering symptom I have is random waves of nausea and that reminds me of pregnancy as well. (Disclaimer: I am quite positive that I am neither concussed nor pregnant.)

Yet, because my symptoms aren’t “visible” – there’s nothing super obvious on the outside, I’m not up all night coughing, heck I haven’t even got the occasional barking cough like some of the other members of the household, that it’s starting to feel like my symptoms are in my head and don’t really count. I’m starting to self invalidate my symptoms because while they’re real, they’re exactly the type of thing that our capitalistic society teaches us to minimise and ignore and ‘push through’, because so-called ‘productivity’ is more important. It was almost a relief, in a way, when I had the bout of diarrohea today… because it was at least another physical symptom, albeit one that’s less obvious than others might be, that ‘yes, I really am still sick’. It’s not that I want to be sick at all, but when my body is noticeably and violently acting out, it’s easier to be like ‘see? not just all in my head.’

Currently I seem to go for periods of roughly four hours of ‘up’ time before I crash… sometimes needing a nap, and sometimes just a solid lie-down, before being able to get up and carry on. To be clear, by being ‘up’ and ‘carrying on’ I’m referring at this point to nothing more strenuous than sitting upright, occasionally wandering to the toilet or vaguely supervising children, or spending the hour or two a day trying to sort out work for the students. 

And that’s the thing. I’ve dealt with fatigue and brain fog and confusion quite a lot over my adult life. I’ve had it when concussed. I’ve had it as the result of autistic burnout and depression. I had it to a lesser extent when pregnant. Consistently the message I get from society, implicitly but to a lesser extent explicitly as well is to ‘just push through’. Yet, one of the things we’re seeing with this virus is that it’s those that push through that seem at a higher risk of being the ones who catch long Covid, being the ones who never really get better… or at least, not at the same rate as their peers. After all, we’re still early enough into our knowledge of this virus that we honestly don’t know whether it’s a ‘never’ or whether it’s a ‘significantly reduced recovery rate’, but one with an actual end. 

The logical thing to do is to listen to my body, and trust it to guide me for what’s expected. It’s actually been a blessing having a mandatory isolation period, because it’s removed that anxiety of ‘am I better enough to work yet’ from the equation. Nevermind that there is still some degree of work carrying on anyway – I’m not only a teacher but an acting head of department, so at the bare minimum I’m having to juggle the three teacher loads that I’ve been juggling since the year began, figuring out the lesson for the respective classes. I’m also starting to get work pouring in from the various classes. That, so far, has stayed in the too hard basket. I feel bad about it… but what can I do? 

But, my official isolation period ends at the end of the day on Wednesday. It’s not looking likely that I’ll be well enough to bounce straight back into work… but after that date, I have the added guilt of choosing something else over my work, even if that something is my health. 

At the same time, I’m only 5 days or so into my official diagnosis with COVID, but it’s seeming like forever. It’s strange how easy it is to project the ‘now’ onto the ‘forever’. Especially since I feel roughly the same way today as I did yesterday, which was roughly the same way I felt the day before. After only three days at a plateau I find myself wondering ‘will it ever end?’ It’s not comforting to know that some people are two years into this and wondering the same thing. 

I am an NPC

I identify as a Xennial.  The first 12 years of my life were entirely “offline”; I remember a time before the wireless home phone, and although we didn’t have one in our house, I have used a rotary phone on multiple occasions.  

When I was 12, however, we got our first internet capable computer, a PowerMac.  It came preloaded with eWorld, which at the time was an online service provider exclusive to their subscribers (the service of which was charged on a per-minute basis).  

What this means is that I remember a time “before” the Internet (certainly before how we know it now) but also, all of my teen years were influenced by what I found online. 

What, then, did I find online?  

Amidst all the fear mongering about this “dangerous new world” inhabited by “predators and axe murderers”, I found honest, kind, and open-minded people.  Although I occasionally dabbled in the “teen” chat rooms, I had very little patience for the constant streams of “a/s/l” or the inane, repetitive, and meaningless chatter that filled those spaces.  Instead, I stumbled into spaces aimed at adults.  Not in the creepy, “adult only” context, but merely, spaces created by adults and generally aimed at similar adult conversation. 

And I loved it.  People immediately accepted me, and it never occurred to me to either obscure or lie about my age.  Yet, I participated in the conversation, sometimes lurking more than chatting, sometimes participating equally.  I found groups like Women Online Worldwide that was made up of women of all ages, all across the globe, gathering together in online spaces simply designed to chat about topics we have in common.  I found spaces aimed for encouraging the creatives; writer’s groups that posted weekly topics and allowed us to imagine, create, and cultivate our talent.  

Online, I found endless spaces that accepted me simply for who I was.  In real life, I was battling the constant dance of trying to fit in but always failing.  I was trying to craft my personality to be accepted, and yet only falling short and being further rejected.  Online, I just “was”, in a way I had never before experienced.  

When I was 13, my mother and I traveled across the United States, exclusively for the purpose of meeting, individually, many of the people with whom we’d been talking for the past year or so.  Before we ever met them in person, in many cases we’d arranged to stay overnight at their houses before traveling on to the next leg.  We met over twenty different people, in multiple states, during that trip.  No experiences were negative, and we only had two no-shows.  It came at a time after I’d been white-knuckling my way through middle-school, and had yet to move on to the bigger sea of high school, where I did eventually find my own little group of other oddballs like me. This trip helped to restore my faith in humanity.  Yes, there are bad people in the world, and yes, some of them can be found online as easily as offline.  Yet we’d managed to find endless examples of the good, and that helped to colour how I’ve gone on to see the world. 

Eventually I found my husband online too.  That was somewhat of a happy accident.  

Years later, after moving from California to New Zealand to be with said now-husband, I found myself pregnant with my first child and mystified about what to expect, with very little in-person help or contacts.  I hadn’t yet made any close friends in person.  The friends I did have were online, and largely in the USA.  

Instead, I found another space online.  At the time this was aimed at people using cloth nappies on their babies, and it featured a forum where people talked a little about nappies and a lot about everything else.  Suddenly, I had another space where I was welcomed and accepted.  Even better, this space was specifically aimed at Kiwis, and had regular meetups (“nappicinos”) in varying cities, including the one in which I was living.  Suddenly I had a best friend again, and a large circle of other close friends.  We’d met online initially, but that carried over into “real life” for an even stronger bond.  

Online spaces, now, are different to how they used to be. Instead of being a niche environment that only a select group of people had access to, “the internet” has, for the most part, become merely an extension of real life.  The fact that Facebook is populated primarily with pictures of actual people instead of avatars is a defining characteristic of this change.  While that has taken away a layer of anonymity that was constantly accused of allowing bullies to flourish, it also has recreated the superficial ways in which people instinctively label and judge others.  Also, spoiler alert, but there’s still plenty of bullies that don’t mind so much if they’re anonymous or not.  That’s just the nature of bullies. 

Maybe it’s just a product of getting older, but it seems so much harder lately to find “my people” online than it used to be.  Maybe some of the inherent belief I had that people are generally good has been rubbed away by the daily realities of life.  Maybe it’s the added struggle of being already pre-grouped by things like my age, location, and who I know that makes it harder to break out of these assumed norms.  Maybe it’s none of these things. Either way, online spaces suddenly feel far more like real life than they ever did, and as such, it is harder for a socially awkward, rather isolated person to find a niche in.