I think people do not respect psychosomatic symptoms and that setting an intention and showing your body “we can do it” can address psychosomatic symptoms. This was part of me recovering from depression. Sometimes there will be other reasons you are sick, or sometimes that will not address your real need driving the psychosomatic symptoms.
The fact that some physical symptoms are psychological in origin doesn’t make them fake or less important. They just need to be treated in different way, often by treating the whole person, changing intolerable life circumstances, or by conquering a fear.
Great essay, and I hope you continue to feel better!
Reminds me a lot of similar things people report with back pain. The phenomenon of “central sensitization” involves becoming heightened to all sorts of minor signals from your nervous system, which can keep the pain cycle going; in contrast, sometimes resolutely deciding to do stuff (not necessarily “pushing through” pain, but also not being overly protective) can help symptoms. I resonated a lot with your description of constantly monitoring health symptoms, etc There’s so much we don’t understand about chronic issues.
Thank you for this kind and thoughtful comment. I am mulling your note on "pushing through," as I've been already trying to understand what language best describes the approach I've been taking. I do find the "pushing through" concept to be motivating to me and to accurately describe my experience, but perhaps it's worth qualifying what that has looked like for me - specifically that the challenging aspects of the experience (pain/fatigue/fear) tend to yield throughout the activity, as opposed to worsening. More to think about as I'm planning another post where I'll write more about the tack I've taken through this recovery process and hope to communicate this aspect well.
Completely unrelated but I've been interested in learning more about what's going on in academic cognitive science / AI research, and your recent blog posts look very interesting! I subscribed and look forward to reading.
I’m really glad this worked for you. The painful truth of complex diseases and the internet is that everything worked for somebody, nothing works for everybody, and most things you read about probably won’t work for you. The other painful thing is that every story that reads as “how I overcame my disease through willpower” is unfortunately victim-blaming if it’s presented as something that will work. So while I’m glad you shared your story, I’m also sad because there are 100% people who are suffering now who will read this and take it as proof that they’re only sick because they’re doing something wrong.
And people who know them will take it as a sign that they’re not trying hard enough. My most recent post is about this! Beautiful story as long as people understand it’s not 👏 universal 👏
Here's an extra n=1: I read your article one week ago, in a coffee shop. Inspired by it, I marched home (walking with a backpack at full speed), for about 1 hour and 20 minutes. No issues, felt good. Next day, I lifted weights, for an hour, which I haven't done in one year. And so on. One week later, still feeling good.
Previously, I had PEM, fatigue and brain fog, for about 1.5 years. I initially had other symptoms, but those went away eventually and I was left with these three.
Yes!!! I am so stoked to hear this! I hope you continue feeling better and better, and would be happy to hear any updates as time goes on.
FWIW: it's now three weeks out for me and things keep improving - still feeling good, ramping up exercise, and the lingering fears I mentioned at the end of the essay are basically no longer part of my experience.
By the way, I found an interesting (preprint) paper about how our bodies might be going from “energy” at mitochondria level to "energy” (or fatigue) at body level: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/ekj54_v3 via @Martin Picard
Fascinating! I’m currently on month 3 of some complicated post-viral immunological weirdness and it’s encouraging to read stories like yours even if I’m not at a point where I know whether it’s safe/healthy for me to go run these days. I hope I can get to the point where I can knock out a 10k again. I miss it.
Argh this freaks me out! The whole area is so complex and mysterious so who knows why an approach for this might work for some and be properly dangerous for others but I wonder if your history as a physically active person may be a big reason why you had the positive response. I have read research saying the fatigue of long covid and ME/CFS at least is not deconditioning, and so your previous capacities remain waiting for you if you can find your way out of the fatigue. But also, who as a layperson can know what meaningful differences there are between the different fatigue disorders. I read your thing and make a hugely hopeful 😦 face, but then also feel it would be too dangerous to try in my case. (ME/CFS, started maybe 5-10 years ago, no history of intensives physical activity.) I leave this comment partly in case anyone else with a fatigue disorder reads this and has a similar reaction. And I say this as someone who started out with chronic pain and found HUGE help from learning about/working with central sensitisation, then spent ages theorising that fatigue disorders may operate similarly, but I couldn’t find almost any science in support. Absolutely thrilled for you that it has worked, equally thrilled how carefully and with how much good faith you articulated your account.
From one recovering outdoorsy person to another, thank you.
I had meningitis at the start of the year and everyone has been acting like I'm absolutely nuts for trying to reintroduce exercise to my routine. While our recoveries and symptoms look different, my experiences with fatigue is similar. When I'm doing not much, it's a landslide. But if I get myself up and go out, ignoring how the first 10 minutes feel, it's almost always better.
This bit especially is what I've been trying to explain to people:
"The plan is to keep at it.
As long as my symptoms do not exceed what I experienced this week I will proceed to treat them with “aggressive contempt,” as Chapman put it. I will continue the current exercise routine, and if that keeps working I will expand it until I’ve reached my ideal pre-fatigue cadence, with respect to the gradual approach required to recondition muscles (especially in weightlifting)."
I hope we both get good access to our bodies back.
🙏 great to read your comment and to hear that you are feeling better after the first ten minutes of exercise. It can definitely be hard to explain such complex situations to people. Maybe that’s part of the benefit of writing a post like this :) When people ask I just say “here’s the post explaining everything” haha.
This was so validating and encouraging thank you! Part of my management has been putting myself on 3 week “focused/hard” sprints of biking, focused mobility/yoga work, strength training and then on the 4th week just doing less intensity but keeping the same activities. I then repeat this. I can mostly maintain without crashing or feeling really sick AS LONG as I can keep other life stresses in check. It’s been really important to me to orient my available energy around the activities I want to do, rather than using all my energy for work or other people. I’m so stoked for you to keep feeling good by sticking to keeping yourself moving 💜💜💜
Hi Di, glad you found this encouraging, and thanks for sharing about your sprint/rest cycles! That seems like a reasonable approach to me, something I might incorporate into my own life too. It does seem that rest on both large and small time scales can be very helpful, and glad to hear that's working for you.
> It’s been really important to me to orient my available energy around the activities I want to do, rather than using all my energy for work or other people.
A good note too. Since my physical activity stuff has been going well I'm now ramping up other work-related responsibilities. That's all pretty new, so I hope to approach that in a gradual way too if possible.
"It’s hard to describe. My felt experience of making health-related decisions is one of deep, complex uncertainty. As if I am dealing with a tangled ball of thoughts and feelings that spans multiple miles, so large that I cannot bring it into view and cannot think straight about it. The main component of the ball is fear, which suffuses everything."
Damn, this hit me. Can 1000% relate with all the health stuff ive been dealing with this past year and it's really hard to put into words. This nervous system stuff is really no joke!! Stoked to hear you're slaying the demon and very excited to hear how progress goes
I very much appreciated the parts like "ended up walking a fair amount". This is fitness content I can relate to!
I don't think I've had exactly the kind of post-viral fatigue you're talking about, but I definitely find that doing exercise helps to shift a head cold better than just resting through it.
Clicked for the arboretum waterfront trail, stayed for the pink send. Which SBP??? I don't have chronic pain and would rather die than run six miles so respect
Yeah, this is very dangerous. There are indeed stories where it somehow resets the body (which doesn't mean that the fatigue and other symptoms were fake). But there are also plenty of stories where people end up bedbound with (very) severe ME/CFS after extreme overexertion. That is a condition you do NOT want yourself, or want to have in your conscience.
Also, there ARE clinical diagnostic criteria distinguishing ME/CFS from post-viral/idiopathic chronic fatigue, such as the International Consensus Criteria
Graded Exercise Therapy is also the lowest-scoring therapy with highest harm rates in this re-analysis I did of a survey (n=4000 LC & ME /CFS patients). Yes a patient survey will have its biases but there's a real signal here:
Thanks for the comment. My primary intention here was to report accurately on my own story, but also I would not want to mislead anyone, so I take these critiques seriously.
On the clinical diagnostic criteria in particular, I've updated my language as follows: "Furthermore, post-viral fatigue from mono and post-viral fatigue from COVID are not clinically distinguishable - they share symptoms, mechanisms, and even treatment recommendations." That's the actual claim I wished to make.
On the GET result: In part I worry about selection bias as you mention, but also, I don't feel confident that my personal approach maps well to the styles of "GET" that a survey respondent might have tried. My own story has a lot of complexity - long periods of rest, long periods of gradually increasing exercise while being sensitive to symptoms and ramping down often, and then the recent periods of being less sensitive to symptoms. The whole time I was operating based on my own judgements and my own collected evidence about my physical abilities, as opposed to following a set schedule. So I take these studies seriously, but the resulting update to my personal risk models is limited.
While PEM risk was on my mind when I went on the run, I was also weighing the evidence I had collected of my personal exercise tolerance, and the significant potential rewards of proving certain kinds of symptoms to be surmountable. On reflection, I still believe that deciding to do the run was a reasonable choice, though it had its risks. As such, and given that I included all of the relevant personal context, I do not feel that I'm misleading people by sharing my story.
I'm still mulling if there's some extra caveat to include and what that would look like, but haven't settled on anything yet, and provisionally am fine just saying "here's the complete story, take what you will" and sticking with the current caveats.
With all that said, I still have a fair amount of uncertainty, so am open to further suggestions or disagreements.
> That is a condition you do NOT want yourself, or want to have in your conscience.
I completely agree and for that reason wish to stay open-minded and to keep learning.
Thanks for the good faith reply and the update🙏🏻 Fair point on your approach being different from GET (even though I still think you took a big risk).
If you wish to dive more into the science, I think you'll find that the actual empirical basis for those false alarm/psychosomatic theories is remarkably thin/absent. A lot of citation circles and shoddy methodology. And actually, even 'placebo' is remarkably weak and of limited scope.
Best of luck to you and your health journey in any case!
I want to leave a comment as someone who has spent nearly a decade dealing with this problem.
I'm still not entirely sure what caused mine, never tested positive for Mono despite multiple tests, possibly related to POTS and stress? Who knows, but I suddenly got really sick when I was 16 and dealt with the same cycle of fatigue, inability to exercise, unexplained pain and symptoms. I had horrible mental fogginess and spent the majority of my time asleep or in bed when I wasn't at school. I was at the point where I had to use a wheelchair to go on outings longer than a couple hours to avoid being in excruciating pain and sick for days on end afterwards. It always felt like I had the flu without actually having it.
For a few years I was convinced I'd never get better. I read about CFS and PEM and how pushing yourself can make you sicker. I tried my best to manage my activity level to minimize symptoms. I graduated from HS a year early, knowing that if I didn't I'd crash and have to drop out. I thought I'd never go to college or hold down a part-time job. And this continued for a couple years after I graduated. I did manage to get out of the house once a week to volunteer, and eventually got a part time job there where I could decide my own schedule. But I would still come home and spend the days after recovering.
Then came the pandemic. Suddenly everyone was equally as confined to their houses as I was, their lives equally on pause, and while quarantine was still a really rough time, it felt like I was finally on equal footing. I was able to start college since everything was online, teachers more forgiving and leinient so I could work at my own pace, my workplace was closed so I didn't have to plan around being healthy enough to physically function. I started exercising, slowly at first, and ramped up from there.
I'd crash A LOT during that time. But it was okay, because I also had time to rest. By the time my university opened back up, I was physically well enough to go in person. I also started working again. Then I started an internship, and managed all three of these things at the same time without severely declining in health. Sometimes I'd push myself too hard, get really sick and start to doubt if I can maintain it, but I'd always eventually recover.
Now I'm 25 and graduated from college, hold down a full-time job, and am actively involved in outdoorsy activities. I frequently go hiking, I started climbing this year, and camping last year. I hope to start backpacking soon. Myself from nine years ago wouldve thought this type of life was a pipe dream, but it just took several years of hard work and not giving up.
I'm saying all this as a reassurance, I know this isn't applicable to everyone, some people do experience severe life altering declines when they push themselves and I'm not saying they should just work harder. Everyone is different. But I want to show that it's also possible to recover.
I still experience setbacks healthy people my age don't have to worry about. My symptoms never went away, they just got easier to manage. Some days I can do several highly physical days back to back, and others a single hike will put me out of commission for a week. The first month I started climbing, my migraines increased in severity and almost without fail would occur after every session. I did take a break, slowed it down, but I eventually came back. I didn't let it stop me, and now I can climb several times a week without increasing my symptoms. I also take longer to recover from viral illnesses and injuries, and I've just come to accept that's how my body works, and I'll work around it. It's all about learning your limits, knowing when it's okay to push and when you need to rest.
It's also an exercise in patience. I couldn't have pushed myself this hard right from the get-go. It took years to get to where I am, and I still have days where I fear it'll all come crashing down. And maybe one day it will, who knows, but in the meantime I'll continue to live my life to the fullest extent I can manage.
I hope this can serve as a motivator for others who are still trudging through the worst of it. This type of thing can feel like taking 2 steps forward 12 steps back sometimes, but eventually you start taking more steps ahead than you do behind. I was ready to give up on my life entirely. This path hasn't been a kind one, and I've hit my absolute lowest lows walking it. Losing your physical health is an incredibly hard loss, one that warrants grief. It's the loss of a life you could've lived, the loss of your agency and your ability to trust in your body. A loss most don't contend with until they're further in age and already had a chance to take advantage of their time. It's one that is difficult to recover from and one that some might not be able to handle, but if you can make it, you know you can also trust in your own resilience. That life can throw some really shit curve balls at you, but you can still make it out as a whole person. A person you can depend on.
I still grieve the time I lost to illness, but I also value my life and my physical ability that much more. I refuse to take the time I have now for granted.
Thanks for sharing this. Like I said in another comment, I’m currently a few months into some post-viral immunological weirdness and fatigue, and it’s very encouraging to read other people’s reports of learning how to manage and build their capacity to do things.
I think people do not respect psychosomatic symptoms and that setting an intention and showing your body “we can do it” can address psychosomatic symptoms. This was part of me recovering from depression. Sometimes there will be other reasons you are sick, or sometimes that will not address your real need driving the psychosomatic symptoms.
The fact that some physical symptoms are psychological in origin doesn’t make them fake or less important. They just need to be treated in different way, often by treating the whole person, changing intolerable life circumstances, or by conquering a fear.
Great essay, and I hope you continue to feel better!
Reminds me a lot of similar things people report with back pain. The phenomenon of “central sensitization” involves becoming heightened to all sorts of minor signals from your nervous system, which can keep the pain cycle going; in contrast, sometimes resolutely deciding to do stuff (not necessarily “pushing through” pain, but also not being overly protective) can help symptoms. I resonated a lot with your description of constantly monitoring health symptoms, etc There’s so much we don’t understand about chronic issues.
Thank you for this kind and thoughtful comment. I am mulling your note on "pushing through," as I've been already trying to understand what language best describes the approach I've been taking. I do find the "pushing through" concept to be motivating to me and to accurately describe my experience, but perhaps it's worth qualifying what that has looked like for me - specifically that the challenging aspects of the experience (pain/fatigue/fear) tend to yield throughout the activity, as opposed to worsening. More to think about as I'm planning another post where I'll write more about the tack I've taken through this recovery process and hope to communicate this aspect well.
Completely unrelated but I've been interested in learning more about what's going on in academic cognitive science / AI research, and your recent blog posts look very interesting! I subscribed and look forward to reading.
I’m really glad this worked for you. The painful truth of complex diseases and the internet is that everything worked for somebody, nothing works for everybody, and most things you read about probably won’t work for you. The other painful thing is that every story that reads as “how I overcame my disease through willpower” is unfortunately victim-blaming if it’s presented as something that will work. So while I’m glad you shared your story, I’m also sad because there are 100% people who are suffering now who will read this and take it as proof that they’re only sick because they’re doing something wrong.
And people who know them will take it as a sign that they’re not trying hard enough. My most recent post is about this! Beautiful story as long as people understand it’s not 👏 universal 👏
Here's an extra n=1: I read your article one week ago, in a coffee shop. Inspired by it, I marched home (walking with a backpack at full speed), for about 1 hour and 20 minutes. No issues, felt good. Next day, I lifted weights, for an hour, which I haven't done in one year. And so on. One week later, still feeling good.
Previously, I had PEM, fatigue and brain fog, for about 1.5 years. I initially had other symptoms, but those went away eventually and I was left with these three.
So thank you for the inspiration!
Yes!!! I am so stoked to hear this! I hope you continue feeling better and better, and would be happy to hear any updates as time goes on.
FWIW: it's now three weeks out for me and things keep improving - still feeling good, ramping up exercise, and the lingering fears I mentioned at the end of the essay are basically no longer part of my experience.
By the way, I found an interesting (preprint) paper about how our bodies might be going from “energy” at mitochondria level to "energy” (or fatigue) at body level: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/ekj54_v3 via @Martin Picard
Final paper coming soon
Thanks Roland for the pointer. I read the abstract, may read more soon and excited to see the final paper when it's out.
Fascinating! I’m currently on month 3 of some complicated post-viral immunological weirdness and it’s encouraging to read stories like yours even if I’m not at a point where I know whether it’s safe/healthy for me to go run these days. I hope I can get to the point where I can knock out a 10k again. I miss it.
Thanks for the comment, good luck with your recovery!
Glad you got out to run the Arboretum. Seward is another great loop
Argh this freaks me out! The whole area is so complex and mysterious so who knows why an approach for this might work for some and be properly dangerous for others but I wonder if your history as a physically active person may be a big reason why you had the positive response. I have read research saying the fatigue of long covid and ME/CFS at least is not deconditioning, and so your previous capacities remain waiting for you if you can find your way out of the fatigue. But also, who as a layperson can know what meaningful differences there are between the different fatigue disorders. I read your thing and make a hugely hopeful 😦 face, but then also feel it would be too dangerous to try in my case. (ME/CFS, started maybe 5-10 years ago, no history of intensives physical activity.) I leave this comment partly in case anyone else with a fatigue disorder reads this and has a similar reaction. And I say this as someone who started out with chronic pain and found HUGE help from learning about/working with central sensitisation, then spent ages theorising that fatigue disorders may operate similarly, but I couldn’t find almost any science in support. Absolutely thrilled for you that it has worked, equally thrilled how carefully and with how much good faith you articulated your account.
From one recovering outdoorsy person to another, thank you.
I had meningitis at the start of the year and everyone has been acting like I'm absolutely nuts for trying to reintroduce exercise to my routine. While our recoveries and symptoms look different, my experiences with fatigue is similar. When I'm doing not much, it's a landslide. But if I get myself up and go out, ignoring how the first 10 minutes feel, it's almost always better.
This bit especially is what I've been trying to explain to people:
"The plan is to keep at it.
As long as my symptoms do not exceed what I experienced this week I will proceed to treat them with “aggressive contempt,” as Chapman put it. I will continue the current exercise routine, and if that keeps working I will expand it until I’ve reached my ideal pre-fatigue cadence, with respect to the gradual approach required to recondition muscles (especially in weightlifting)."
I hope we both get good access to our bodies back.
🙏 great to read your comment and to hear that you are feeling better after the first ten minutes of exercise. It can definitely be hard to explain such complex situations to people. Maybe that’s part of the benefit of writing a post like this :) When people ask I just say “here’s the post explaining everything” haha.
This was so validating and encouraging thank you! Part of my management has been putting myself on 3 week “focused/hard” sprints of biking, focused mobility/yoga work, strength training and then on the 4th week just doing less intensity but keeping the same activities. I then repeat this. I can mostly maintain without crashing or feeling really sick AS LONG as I can keep other life stresses in check. It’s been really important to me to orient my available energy around the activities I want to do, rather than using all my energy for work or other people. I’m so stoked for you to keep feeling good by sticking to keeping yourself moving 💜💜💜
Hi Di, glad you found this encouraging, and thanks for sharing about your sprint/rest cycles! That seems like a reasonable approach to me, something I might incorporate into my own life too. It does seem that rest on both large and small time scales can be very helpful, and glad to hear that's working for you.
> It’s been really important to me to orient my available energy around the activities I want to do, rather than using all my energy for work or other people.
A good note too. Since my physical activity stuff has been going well I'm now ramping up other work-related responsibilities. That's all pretty new, so I hope to approach that in a gradual way too if possible.
"It’s hard to describe. My felt experience of making health-related decisions is one of deep, complex uncertainty. As if I am dealing with a tangled ball of thoughts and feelings that spans multiple miles, so large that I cannot bring it into view and cannot think straight about it. The main component of the ball is fear, which suffuses everything."
Damn, this hit me. Can 1000% relate with all the health stuff ive been dealing with this past year and it's really hard to put into words. This nervous system stuff is really no joke!! Stoked to hear you're slaying the demon and very excited to hear how progress goes
I very much appreciated the parts like "ended up walking a fair amount". This is fitness content I can relate to!
I don't think I've had exactly the kind of post-viral fatigue you're talking about, but I definitely find that doing exercise helps to shift a head cold better than just resting through it.
Clicked for the arboretum waterfront trail, stayed for the pink send. Which SBP??? I don't have chronic pain and would rather die than run six miles so respect
SBP Poplar! Here's the location if you wanna try it :) https://imgur.com/a/etfbhC2
This is an amazing story! Thank you for writing about your experience and congrats on pushing through
Thank you Maia!
Wow bravo, thanks for sharing. What a way to capture the fear spirals associated with deciding when to do more exercise. I relate personally
Yeah, this is very dangerous. There are indeed stories where it somehow resets the body (which doesn't mean that the fatigue and other symptoms were fake). But there are also plenty of stories where people end up bedbound with (very) severe ME/CFS after extreme overexertion. That is a condition you do NOT want yourself, or want to have in your conscience.
Also, there ARE clinical diagnostic criteria distinguishing ME/CFS from post-viral/idiopathic chronic fatigue, such as the International Consensus Criteria
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3427890/.
Graded Exercise Therapy is also the lowest-scoring therapy with highest harm rates in this re-analysis I did of a survey (n=4000 LC & ME /CFS patients). Yes a patient survey will have its biases but there's a real signal here:
https://viralpersistence.substack.com/p/re-analyzing-the-treatme-survey?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6rc6a
Thanks for the comment. My primary intention here was to report accurately on my own story, but also I would not want to mislead anyone, so I take these critiques seriously.
On the clinical diagnostic criteria in particular, I've updated my language as follows: "Furthermore, post-viral fatigue from mono and post-viral fatigue from COVID are not clinically distinguishable - they share symptoms, mechanisms, and even treatment recommendations." That's the actual claim I wished to make.
On the GET result: In part I worry about selection bias as you mention, but also, I don't feel confident that my personal approach maps well to the styles of "GET" that a survey respondent might have tried. My own story has a lot of complexity - long periods of rest, long periods of gradually increasing exercise while being sensitive to symptoms and ramping down often, and then the recent periods of being less sensitive to symptoms. The whole time I was operating based on my own judgements and my own collected evidence about my physical abilities, as opposed to following a set schedule. So I take these studies seriously, but the resulting update to my personal risk models is limited.
While PEM risk was on my mind when I went on the run, I was also weighing the evidence I had collected of my personal exercise tolerance, and the significant potential rewards of proving certain kinds of symptoms to be surmountable. On reflection, I still believe that deciding to do the run was a reasonable choice, though it had its risks. As such, and given that I included all of the relevant personal context, I do not feel that I'm misleading people by sharing my story.
I'm still mulling if there's some extra caveat to include and what that would look like, but haven't settled on anything yet, and provisionally am fine just saying "here's the complete story, take what you will" and sticking with the current caveats.
With all that said, I still have a fair amount of uncertainty, so am open to further suggestions or disagreements.
> That is a condition you do NOT want yourself, or want to have in your conscience.
I completely agree and for that reason wish to stay open-minded and to keep learning.
Thanks for the good faith reply and the update🙏🏻 Fair point on your approach being different from GET (even though I still think you took a big risk).
If you wish to dive more into the science, I think you'll find that the actual empirical basis for those false alarm/psychosomatic theories is remarkably thin/absent. A lot of citation circles and shoddy methodology. And actually, even 'placebo' is remarkably weak and of limited scope.
Best of luck to you and your health journey in any case!
I want to leave a comment as someone who has spent nearly a decade dealing with this problem.
I'm still not entirely sure what caused mine, never tested positive for Mono despite multiple tests, possibly related to POTS and stress? Who knows, but I suddenly got really sick when I was 16 and dealt with the same cycle of fatigue, inability to exercise, unexplained pain and symptoms. I had horrible mental fogginess and spent the majority of my time asleep or in bed when I wasn't at school. I was at the point where I had to use a wheelchair to go on outings longer than a couple hours to avoid being in excruciating pain and sick for days on end afterwards. It always felt like I had the flu without actually having it.
For a few years I was convinced I'd never get better. I read about CFS and PEM and how pushing yourself can make you sicker. I tried my best to manage my activity level to minimize symptoms. I graduated from HS a year early, knowing that if I didn't I'd crash and have to drop out. I thought I'd never go to college or hold down a part-time job. And this continued for a couple years after I graduated. I did manage to get out of the house once a week to volunteer, and eventually got a part time job there where I could decide my own schedule. But I would still come home and spend the days after recovering.
Then came the pandemic. Suddenly everyone was equally as confined to their houses as I was, their lives equally on pause, and while quarantine was still a really rough time, it felt like I was finally on equal footing. I was able to start college since everything was online, teachers more forgiving and leinient so I could work at my own pace, my workplace was closed so I didn't have to plan around being healthy enough to physically function. I started exercising, slowly at first, and ramped up from there.
I'd crash A LOT during that time. But it was okay, because I also had time to rest. By the time my university opened back up, I was physically well enough to go in person. I also started working again. Then I started an internship, and managed all three of these things at the same time without severely declining in health. Sometimes I'd push myself too hard, get really sick and start to doubt if I can maintain it, but I'd always eventually recover.
Now I'm 25 and graduated from college, hold down a full-time job, and am actively involved in outdoorsy activities. I frequently go hiking, I started climbing this year, and camping last year. I hope to start backpacking soon. Myself from nine years ago wouldve thought this type of life was a pipe dream, but it just took several years of hard work and not giving up.
I'm saying all this as a reassurance, I know this isn't applicable to everyone, some people do experience severe life altering declines when they push themselves and I'm not saying they should just work harder. Everyone is different. But I want to show that it's also possible to recover.
I still experience setbacks healthy people my age don't have to worry about. My symptoms never went away, they just got easier to manage. Some days I can do several highly physical days back to back, and others a single hike will put me out of commission for a week. The first month I started climbing, my migraines increased in severity and almost without fail would occur after every session. I did take a break, slowed it down, but I eventually came back. I didn't let it stop me, and now I can climb several times a week without increasing my symptoms. I also take longer to recover from viral illnesses and injuries, and I've just come to accept that's how my body works, and I'll work around it. It's all about learning your limits, knowing when it's okay to push and when you need to rest.
It's also an exercise in patience. I couldn't have pushed myself this hard right from the get-go. It took years to get to where I am, and I still have days where I fear it'll all come crashing down. And maybe one day it will, who knows, but in the meantime I'll continue to live my life to the fullest extent I can manage.
I hope this can serve as a motivator for others who are still trudging through the worst of it. This type of thing can feel like taking 2 steps forward 12 steps back sometimes, but eventually you start taking more steps ahead than you do behind. I was ready to give up on my life entirely. This path hasn't been a kind one, and I've hit my absolute lowest lows walking it. Losing your physical health is an incredibly hard loss, one that warrants grief. It's the loss of a life you could've lived, the loss of your agency and your ability to trust in your body. A loss most don't contend with until they're further in age and already had a chance to take advantage of their time. It's one that is difficult to recover from and one that some might not be able to handle, but if you can make it, you know you can also trust in your own resilience. That life can throw some really shit curve balls at you, but you can still make it out as a whole person. A person you can depend on.
I still grieve the time I lost to illness, but I also value my life and my physical ability that much more. I refuse to take the time I have now for granted.
Anyway, off my soapbox.
Thanks for sharing this. Like I said in another comment, I’m currently a few months into some post-viral immunological weirdness and fatigue, and it’s very encouraging to read other people’s reports of learning how to manage and build their capacity to do things.