The Impairing Curse
I spent the first years of the pandemic trying not to die. Not in the literal sense of taking precautions against a deadly virus, though I did that too. Not in the same urgent way as an ICU patient, septic and deoxygenating, though I was hospitalized occasionally. Not in the suicidal sense, though I was, for a time. But in the most mundane, microscopic of ways: I caught COVID in March 2020 and my body forgot how to live.
This substack is a long-form, serialized experiment; a craft exercise in sifting ideas from poetry to prose, and back again; and a story it has taken me 3+ years to reteach myself how to write. Written with love for everyone who has gotten sick and those who have always been sick. Launched long past the cultural moment when personal stories of the more horrific, less headline-worthy aspects of long covid were of widespread interest and into a broken media landscape in which content distribution is fractured. On halloween, because this is a kind of ghost story.
Part science journalism, part body horror, part lyric essay, part policy analysis, part poetry. All true, even the monsters.
