no 31

Have you accidentally looked into the sun or bright light and then looked away, the image burned into your eyelids? That’s an afterimage.

I’m back. I survived Covid. I struggled to edit this installment. My brain doesn’t feel like it’s quite all there. I hope it makes sense.

I put on proper clothes and stayed in them for the entire day without changing into pyjamas and crawling back into bed. (The American in me counts leggings and a sweatshirt as “proper clothes”.)

Here's what I saw, heard, or sensed that’s stayed with me in the past week. Let’s begin.

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Message from my Taste Buds: Sick Jelly

My nose was blocked, and it came with a cough. I knew it was my usual head cold. My dad gets it. My brother gets it. I get it. We get it when the tip of our noses gets cold. We call it the Mega Nose Cold. It isn’t contagious. It’s more like a mechanical error or a botched construction job, how our noses are connected to the rest of our respiratory system. It heralds the beginning of the winter season.

I tested myself at home with the rapid antigen kit. Negative. Knowing what happens when I leave the Mega Nose Cold to heal on its own (bronchitis), I went to see a doctor for a decongestant prescription. Why was my temperature 38.9 (102F)?

They tested me. Positive. I was dead to the world for two weeks.

After my diagnosis and a long stretch of high fever, I couldn’t do anything, not even watch Netflix or scroll Instagram mindlessly. Both my brain and legs felt like jelly, and it was time to switch off my phone. Before I closed Instagram, I paused to like a retro-looking photo of molded jelly, a food story two friends shot for Epicurious.com.

The photo gave me something unexpected: the aftertaste of orange Jello cubes from my childhood, the only thing I could swallow when I was delirious with fever and hoarse from sand-papery sore throats. Since then, orange has been the official taste of illness and a body rendered listless through Jello, children’s aspirin, and vitamin C tablets.

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Message from my Body: Town and Country

I wrote the following sections for Afterimage, intended for your inbox two weeks ago. In hindsight, the fatigue I wrote about was probably the onset of Covid.

I was tired this week. I felt like I just came home from a visit to New York City.

I love visiting Manhattan, but a funny thing happens. I’m drained when I’m back in my hotel room, and I need ample time to recollect and ground. It took me more than forty years to learn this was a typical response from my nervous system. Crowds and densely populated places wipe me out. I gain energy from solitude and quiet spaces to collect my thoughts and ground.

How do I ground? I “get into my body”. I sleep, eat, sit in a big bath and let the water weigh down on me. I ground, literally: I let my bare feet onto the grass or snow, pretending I’m rooted into the earth. I look toward the sun with my eyes closed. And I breathe.

Now that I live in the countryside, I can do this anytime. I moved from the city before I knew this about myself. I guess the body always knows.

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Message from my Body: Trellises and Nutrients

For me, relationships are like cities: they’re places for connection and support, a place to live and work– and if I’m not mindful, places that can deplete me. By relationships, I mean being connected to the people I love, those I work with, and those who share a neighborhood with me.

Relationships, like cities, require time and energy. To cultivate my relationships in a way that works for me, I’ve learned how to spend, conserve and top up my energy.

Here’s what I think about when it comes to sustaining relationships:

Know where to invest and how much. Relationships change because the way we relate to each other (and ourselves) evolve over time, space, and life stages. If a relationship changes, how I spend time and energy in them will change, too.

Even though less time with a friend may feel like the relationship is diminishing, it’s offering each other room to continue to grow. When a relationship ends, it isn’t a bad thing. It may require some mourning, but it’s not “bad” per se.

Set Boundaries. Boundaries used to make me feel stingy. Now I see them as a guardrail for me to stay upright in my self-care. It’s like a trellis— a support to expand myself and bloom. I’m a tangle on the ground when I don't establish boundaries. I can’t tell whether I’m a wild weed or a long-awaited vine.

Schedule Self Care. It doesn't exist for me if it’s not on the calendar. What qualifies as self-care? A nap. A micro nap. A bath at home or my local outdoor onsen along the river. A hike. A massage. Discovering a new spot for coffee and scheduling an empty appointment afterward for spaciousness.

Keeping a Joy List

I keep a Joy List, a list of self-care activities that make me smile. They might take 5 or 50 minutes. An entire weekend. Think of it as a list of potential Artist's Dates ready to go, like a menu:

• A cup of coffee in my garden.
• Stepping out to the garden to taste the grapes or the peppers to guess when they will be ready.
• Micro naps.
• Drawing a bath with lavender salt.
• Take the (imaginary) dog for a walk around the block.
• Baking bread and making the house smell good.

These are some things on my Joy List.

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A uestion for you: I’ve written frequently about purging physical clutter from our lives over the past few installments. What is the equivalent of weeding if Love and Relationships were a garden? What are ways you weed or declutter your relationship garden?

Thanks for reading and bearing with me and my Covid brain. I'm feeling a little less like jelly.

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