Four years and (almost) three months have passed since I last posted here, and I am not the same woman that I was. So much has happened, to me personally and also in the world, that some sort of reckoning is required. I’ll try to keep it brief.
So I stopped writing in this blog at the start of the pandemic, at which point none of us really knew what we were in for, did we? All the things we’d been told could never happen were happening: the schools were closing, the shops were shutting, the planes stopped flying. And here’s where I have to confess that, as an off the charts introvert, I loved lockdown. I’d been unwittingly fantasizing about it all my life, although in my imagination I’d only got as far as being snowed in one winter, perhaps. In those early months, I experienced an unprecedented level of peace and my chronic fatigue syndrome improved noticeably. My entire day was under my control, as far ahead as I could see, and this was paradise. Well, apart from the guilt that is, when I thought of the cost to much of the rest of the world. Mr Litlove used to joke that when the end came, I’d ignore it, and be like those soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Burma believing WW2 was ongoing when it had ended years before. I still think that it would be nice for introverts to be allowed mini-lockdowns on a yearly basis, without large numbers of people needing to die for it to happen.
But there were many things that I hoped would come out of the pandemic and didn’t. I thought that when the world stopped rushing around and had to sit quietly in a room without the usual manic distraction, all the real problems would become clear and in the emptiness, real solutions would arise. I thought we might take the opportunity to cut back on travel and its polluting ways; that we might realize the true value of the caring professions, like nursing and teaching, and pay them accordingly; that we might understand how much community matters; that we might all take the chance to rest and become a bit less angry, and entitled and resentful, because it would be so obvious that life is fragile and it can turn on a dime. I was, of course, completely wrong on all these counts.
In any case, as we entered the first winter of lockdown, I stopped worrying about what other people were or weren’t making of the pandemic. At the start of February 2021, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. To begin with, the doctors hadn’t thought the little lump I’d found was anything dangerous. ‘The index of worry is low’, the consultant said to me, and all I did was wonder where on earth he’d found that phrase. Well, not true. I was terrified, having feared this eventuality so much. In January I had a biopsy and life changed. I entered the timeless time of medical treatment, in which the days go by too slowly and the nights are very long, and the conveyor belt draws you inexorably closer to dreaded appointments. But I was lucky, lucky, lucky. I’ve never considered myself a naturally lucky person, but if I’d been saving my quota of luck up in some cosmic investment bank for this time in my life, I’m good with that. The surgeon squeezed me in on the end of a day’s list on 25th February and I had just the one operation. He told me later that if he hadn’t done it that day, then I would have had to wait until August. I feel weak with gratitude when I think of it.
I spent a week in bed, reading reports of the missing Sarah Everard, pondering fear and risk and safety. The whole experience had given me a compulsive need to find some sort of meaning out of the event. I was listening online to lectures from Alan Watts (I’ll write about him one day) and Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. I can’t say that things always happen for a reason. They don’t. And some things are so awful and cruel and pointless that it would be an insult to suggest it. But I was beginning to think I would survive this, which was something I had never believed possible, and I wanted an insight that was as profound as my terror had been. I couldn’t make out the takeaway: here I was, still alive, when it would have been so easy for fate to nudge me off the edge of the mortal cliff. ‘Think of yourself as dead,’ Marcus Aurelius wrote. ‘You have lived your life, now take what’s left and live properly.’ I wanted to, but how?
It wasn’t until I was going through radiotherapy that I began to get an inkling of an answer. Three weeks of daily treatments and I had been warned there would be serious fatigue. I braced myself for a return to the bad old days of CFS, when I would have thought twice about leaving the house even if it was on fire. But that fatigue never came. And whilst, yes, I was tired, it felt more like a disinclination to get off the sofa, than the old systemic shutdown.
I felt the strangest mixture of triumph and irritation. Ever since 1997, I had thought of myself as a wimp and a coward, suffering some kind of ludicrous anxiety syndrome that was simply a shameful judgment on my lack of moral backbone. I had been so gaslit by our culture over the reality of CFS, I struggled to believe the symptoms of my own body. And yet here I was, radiotherapy a doddle in comparison, and thousands of people contracting long Covid off the back of the virus, just as I had developed CFS off the back of a kind of viral pneumonia. It turned out that I had, in fact, been ill, and the years of working through it had left me more mentally tough than I’d realised. I revised my entire history. I began to look at my body differently. I had healed well after surgery and the fire of survival was in my veins. The clinic sent me to be assessed at their gym and that brought me back down to earth – I was about as unfit as a person could be. But I was determined and very well rested. I made promises to myself of the kind I hadn’t made in years. From this point onwards, I would go to the gym and I would continue to challenge myself.
If you’re hoping I’m now going to describe my triathlon training, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m still me. But I did start going to the gym regularly, and I took up yoga, and I did begin to challenge myself. I traveled to visit my parents, something I hadn’t done in ten years. We went to Bath to visit friends, a distance I hadn’t covered in fifteen years. I didn’t suddenly start loving parties but I realised I’d been wrong to fear them; after all, no one was about to give me a biopsy me at one. I wasn’t writing – I couldn’t, somehow – and I wasn’t reading much either. But the very strangeness of life made me feel vividly alive.
If the trials of the pandemic released something in me, they did a number on Mr Litlove. And that’s where I’d better stop for now. So much for brevity! Part two in a few days’ time.
