Recovery

I finally got COVID, and no amount of work could drag me out of it.

I tested positive for COVID on Saturday, Sept. 3, two days after my husband, Ben, and two days before my youngest son, Josh, whose positive test meant he’d miss the entire first week of first grade.

After dodging COVID for 2.5 years, becoming triple-vaxxed, and also losing a close family member to COVID less than a year ago, the positive test felt penultimate, freighted, and, in some ways, anti-climactic.

I rushed into my sickness the way I typically do: first by denying the fact that I was sick at all, then allowing myself a day or maybe two of watching trashy reality TV on Bravo and MTV, then, as I exited the acute phase of the illness and moved into the phlegmy aftermath, expecting myself to be immediately healed and diving headfirst into all my work and household/family tasks.

I can attest to the fact that being angry at yourself for still being sick does not do anything to progress yourself into healing, but nonetheless I still do it every time. Blessedly, the last time I was really sick was February - early March 2020. I don’t think it was COVID; just a seasonal cold. Nonetheless, while ill I did multiple book presentations, traveled by plane and car, and have a distinct memory of dragging myself to complete a workout routine at a fitness center outside Chicago, dirty Kleenex in tow.

Setting aside my selfishness in these choices (God knows how many people I exposed in my inability to give myself time to heal), I also wonder how much of my refusal to rest comes from internal pressure, and how much comes from external pressure. I admit, while positive for COVID, to thinking repeatedly of all the elderly folks I’d known who’d had the virus, many of whom worked right through it, whether in the Oval Office or on a construction crew.

Work, unlike much else in our world today, is an unqualified virtue. My parents have long both responded to any personal challenge or setback with hours of hard labor, whether it’s scrubbing the floors and toilets on their knees, or hacking away at the lawn with a rake, bending over to pull stubborn weeds.

“Ah,” we think. “That feels better.” At least until our bodies ache afterward, and our minds race again.

I cannot relieve the world’s suffering or stop the polar ice caps melting, but my toilet seat is pristine. Until my young sons forget to lift the seat. Again.

This workaday remedy is, alas, not foolproof. Ultimately, at the end of a long day of physical labor, whether for your paid labor or out of a self-inflicted desire to prove your own worthiness, you will find yourself lying in bed at night, awake, possibly coughing and with a slight headache, lamenting your own unworthiness.

Work, as many of our world’s “essential workers” have found over the past two and a half years, is not the panacea we’ve been told it is. Work will not keep you warm or cool in your house against threats of extreme weather. It will not enable you to afford a place to live at all in an age of predatory lending and rising rents. Work, as much as you love it, will never love you back.

***

While I do not have a substance-use disorder, my life has been touched by the ravages of the disease of addiction, as I’m sure many of yours have been as well. I have also found great utility in the philosophy of the 12 steps, grounded in simple, free meetings with other people who are like you. Connection, it’s said, is a remedy for the isolation of addiction.

Medical science has come a long way in continuing to understand addiction, and the recent advances in medication-assisted treatment have saved many lives. So I do not live by the abstinence-based sobriety-only mantra that some 12-step groups espouse.

At the same time, I believe wholeheartedly in the 12-step gospel: that what ails us most often requires a spiritual treatment as well, and further, there is often no such thing as entirely healed or recovered. We are all, in a sense, living in recovery.

I think this is particularly true in these years as we (hopefully, prayerfully) move to the endemic stage of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Whether or not you personally have survived a bout or bouts of COVID; whether or not you personally, like me, have lost loved ones to this virus; whether you’ve suffered job loss or burnout or career upheaval or family and relationship stress: we are all in various stages of recovery from COVID, and from the attendant crises of 2020-today: the need to confront the trenchant evil of racism, made plain in the murder of George Floyd; and the Jan. 6 insurrection, making clear the popularity of and attraction to violent, extremist, Christian Nationalist political ideologies, in all of our midst.

None of us, I daresay, is healed. No one is completely recovered.

Instead, the world is forcing us to pay attention to our own recovery. In 12-step language, maybe that means admitting our own powerlessness and shortcomings (in religious language, we’d call this confession). Maybe it means that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity (forgiveness). Maybe it means self-examination, examination of our relationships with others, and making amends (reconciliation or sanctification). Maybe it means self-care time, for prayer and meditation, and for attending to our consistent need for space and time to recover. Note that none of these things is “productive” in a capitalist sense of the word.

It strikes me that I often need to be reminded that everything I experience, other than God, is finite. I am finite. The world is finite. As hard as I work, I am mortal. I cannot “have it all,” women’s magazines and Instagram be damned. I am a tiny piece of the puzzle, and I have limited time and energy. If I keep trying to do more, to be more, I will be exhausted and sick; my recovery will move into a state of illness, and I will never be comfortable: I will be restless, irritable, and discontented (per the Big Book). Sound familiar?

I am longing for recovery, for peace and serenity and, ultimately, love: for myself and for those around me. But recovery isn’t free. I have to devote time to it. I have to carve space away from worry, anxiety, and frenetic, seemingly virtuous, work. I have to say again and again that I am valuable because I am, not because I do. And so is everyone else.

The more I judge myself. The more I am unable to show myself mercy. The more I am unable to be free of judgment toward others, and act with mercy toward a world in need. Recovery means the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Sometimes late at night, in the midst of a post-COVID coughing spell or with an ice pack draped around my swollen mosquito bite or pounding head, I will remember to repeat this prayer to myself. I’ll put down my phone, that dualistic arbiter of bad news and catastrophe on one hand; and unrealistic, unachievable utopia on the other, and I will pray and breathe.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I’m probably not there yet, but I’m trying: to be grateful for living in recovery while no longer longing to work myself into an impossible impervious immortality.

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in learning more about life in recovery, I recommend listening to the Dopey Podcast and checking out books by authors like Elizabeth Wurtzel, Sam Quinones, and Nick Flynn, among others. If you or a loved one is living with a substance use disorder and would like to attend a meeting, check out this resource or this one. Al-Anon is a 12-step meeting specifically geared toward family members and loved ones.

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