Weekly Newsletter, COVID Edition
Yep. It finally happened
For those of you who follow me on social media, you already likely know this: sometime over the past week, I finally caught COVID. Apparently, there’s a strain going around, with some of my friends back in the Midwest telling me they know people infected with this damn virus too. Regardless, I figured I’d shoot all of you an update related to this condition so many of us have both suffered through and managed to avoid. Thanks to the brain fog, I’ve condensed this post to bullet points so my rambling (which is already plentiful at the best of times) can stay contained. Basically I want to give a sense of what’s been going through my head these last couple of days as I’ve approached something resembling “recovery” (to which I want to guesstimate…I’m about 60% there?). Anyway let’s get to it.
For those who have never caught COVID or for those lucky enough to be asymptomatic, congrats: you are lucky. This illness feels like hell. It’s not the worst illness I’ve ever contracted—there was a flu I caught in circa…2008, I wanna say, that was truly nightmarish—but this is definitely a rough one. It was only truly wretched for one day—back on Saturday—where I was racked with chills, sore muscles and joints, a completely congested ear (which was the first symptom, funny enough), and a sore throat/hacking cough. I couldn’t tell you if being vaccinated two years ago and boosted one year ago did a damn thing one way or another; I’ll leave that for others to fight about.
On that note, it did affect my mental health a little bit; while getting sick is no one’s fault, I realized that after a good year (really more) of constant hectoring and moralizing from establishment press outlets about the importance of “stopping the spread” and all of that, that there would be a lingering psychological impact that came with that. (And please note: I’m not saying stopping the spread was a bad idea; I’m simply questioning how much those people were actually serious and weren’t just, well, moralizing). The point is after three and a half years of being relatively illness-free (I think I caught a cold once), getting sick with the disease that had been given so much moral baggage by much of the world can feel…weird. Especially when it disrupts plans with loved ones (which this did). And frankly, as little as I was onboard with the messaging back in 2020-2021 (especially its inconsistency regarding outdoor gatherings being determined by politics), I’m pretty sure injecting shame into the mix (e.g. “you’re killing grandma!”) has probably had more lasting effects on more sensitive people than me and was thus a pretty wretched thing for people to do.
With that said, I want to share a story that I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but that I think is funny and worth sharing here and that is this: I’m pretty sure my family and I caught COVID-19 before, specifically back in December of 2019. I say this because we had a family member visit for the holidays from China and he was actually late by about a week. He made it for Christmas, but he had been prevented from leaving the country because he had been held in hospital for what he later would call a “lung thing,” with very little in the way of further explanation. We now know that there was evidence for COVID-19’s emergence in China as early as October of 2019, so it’s not particularly outlandish to connect the dots here. I won’t delve into my views on the lab leak hypothesis because that’s not the point of this post or story, but it’s safe to say that people were coming and going from China while SARS-CoV-2 was out in the wild far earlier than the disease became a pandemic. Anyway, after the family member left in early January 2020, all was well…and then Molly and myself both became stricken with a pretty severe-if-brief respiratory illness. I remember being kind of shocked at how much it knocked us out, and how quickly it dissipated. And then we moved on until March of that year rolled around and, well, we all know the rest. But today, as we sit here quarantining at home, we find ourselves recalling that our symptoms were quite similar back then. The only real difference for me is the plugged ear (which is really just more annoying than anything else). Obviously, there is no way to know. But this does help explain the multitudes of moments where we could have been and were exposed to the virus (including, for me, a trip to Vegas with some friends of mine) with no contraction in sight.
With all that said, there is always the silver lining to a viral illness: we are now stronger for it. There could be after-effects—I have indeed had close friends tell me of their own experiences with it—but in the end, our immune systems are happy to have this newfound knowledge to protect us in the future. It also helps make this virus ever-more endemic to our existence, perhaps to the point where it will indeed join the other common cold variants that already exist.
I’m also making sure to take the necessary breaks so I don’t overwork myself while sick. I’ve had some very kind fans tell me to take it easy and don’t rough myself up to push out the next episode. It’s interesting because a.) my body is in no mood to even let me try, and b.) my brain is yelling at me for not working. This is a sign of workaholism, something with which I’ve started to admit I struggle with, ever since starting the podcast. Because of this, I make it a point to take one day a week completely off (and thankfully, COVID hit me hardest on that day). But I still struggle. I’m able to ward off the unhealthy sense of guilt over “laziness” and so forth by doing some light research (and the occasional blog post, such as this one), but it’s one of those things I know a lot of content creators struggle with. But as I said to one of my listeners on Twitter, I also recognize that if I just tried to power through all this and work, work, work, the content would ultimately suffer. So I’m glad for that ability to self-correct.
WITH ALL THAT SAID: I do plan to get back to recording as soon as the brain fog clears, the congestion dissipates, and I don’t feel exhausted after sitting upright for more than 30 minutes. If you haven’t already, please consider tossing a couple of bucks over on the Patreon page (seriously, for as little as 36 bucks a year, you get to listen to all the episodes ad-free). And if you can’t spare it but have any tips for unclogging a congested ear that has nothing to do with blowing your nose, I will take them below.
Thanks to all of you for your patience as I recover from this stupid illness that I’m sure all of us wish never existed.
—A.