Lady Knight Era
In workout classes I often think of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which bootleg copies of an sophisticated interactive device — A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer — designed to educate upper class neo-Victorian girls to think independently, ends up training an entire army. Twisted in a banded bear-plank side-crunch hip-abduction or a standing sprint push-up in a spin class, alongside 50 other women in matching pilates princess sets, I wonder what we are all training to fight.
In the beginning, long before Long COVID, I took my physical skills, and my ability to pick up new ones, for granted. I didn’t have a childhood ballerina’s precision grace but I had an everyday trust in my own physical capabilities and coordination; my body bouncing back from most collisions, able to bear whatever weight I was cocky enough to carry. My high school soccer coach liked to say I had a foot like a truck — an unstoppable force on the 18-yard line.
I dabbled in knife juggling and hula hooping and kendo and all the delightful circus skills a girl who can’t touch her toes is left with once she rules out being an acrobat. I’d raised myself on stories about lady knights and cross-dressing cross-class heroines whose prior training as archers or hunters, or innate magically abilities, let’s them out-do the boys raised for combat. I loved fantasy stories as a kid far more than my internalized nerdphobia would let me cop to.
In books and movies, training sequences lead to progression and improvement, quests and conquest, the power to fight literal and metaphoric demons. In Long COVID, mostly they lead you back to bed — all energy is ill-spent when you have too little to survive and your body cannot cope with gravity. I spent eons retraining my eyes to move again in smooth saccade motions so I could read, practicing simple bodyweight movements to re-teach my body not to panic and drop me to the floor in a dead faint, to maintain the modicum of neuromuscular connection and proprioception necessary to feed and bathe myself. There is an obvious reason this essay series is called The Impairing Curse and why it repetitively haunts its own back-catalogue of events as I have haunted my own body and sick room.
The curse is that before I got sick, my then girlfriend called me a Responsible Monster, internal alliteration brightening the tease of being on top of my shit. The curse is that she called me her Adventure Girlfriend, game for any activity but standing aisle-still, whether hiking coffin-roads between Scottish train stations or spinning bull-kelp like a lasso on an ocean beach too cold for her to swim. The curse is that her wife called me a Woman of Action, a matchstick between commitment and execution, the queen of follow-through, out the door before anyone else finds their coat. In illness, roles reverse and I become the house-bound, the home-wile, the literally heartbroken, the domesticated horror who wished her domicile would grow legs and roam for her.
In stories, curses happen for a reason: an intergenerational smudge on your family or a moral or ethical failing – rudeness, laziness, hubris, or desire. Even today, some clinicians and researchers unscientifically consider dysautonomia a fear of standing misinterpreting metrics such as elevated norepinephrine or hypertension as emotionally-triggered, treatable with talk therapy or forced exercise. Major studies have described patients as modern lollygagers or bedpressers, underestimating their own capacity and convincing themselves of the story that they cannot walk. In my experience of throwing myself against the wall of my bodily limits every damn day while fighting for medical treatment, most research on this is a waste of paper and an insult to patients. In 2025, we have ample evidence of how a virus undoes a body, and laces it back up wrong like a necromancer.
In Emily Tesh’s book The Incandescent, set at a posh British magic boarding school, the demons range from minor imps inconveniently invading office appliances to archdemons that can eat a child whole and wear their ghost as a skin or possess a teacher from the inside out. The main character, Doctor Walden, is haunted, literally, by her long-dead teenage lover, by her exes and professional and personal missed opportunities, by the risks she took and the demon-caged tattoos she bears to guard against future disaster. As in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, the congregation of young magic, and the necessity of repetition as pedagogy to learn how to wield it, is itself what lures monsters in.
In Morning is Broken, a 2023 short film directed by D. Matthew Beyer and Paul Stafford, our necromancer-fighting heroine Morwenna Morningsong is meadow-frozen, unable to move until her real-world Dungeons and Dragons player cracks her heartbreak and begins to retell her character’s story among friends. Lucia Lorenzi, my lab-mate and research partner in all things bodily science, says I am clearly in my fourth level of illness recovery in DnD terms — adding new feats instead of merely levelling up in existing baseline capacities. I took a swordfighting class — and took a padded sword to the chest so hard my heart stopped working for a moment. I took a Muay Thai class and bruised my own shins kicking my sparring partner’s pads. I took a heels dance class and put decades of femme top skills and mack-truck thighs to the test. I’ve been in my lady knight era wielding all manner of pointy weapons; gender identity: sharp.
In swordfighting, the instructor has us walk across the room and open or close a door to teach us that we’d have to undo a lifetime of movement practice, to learn to lean before reaching, to lead with our sword foot and not flinch from danger. In Muay Thai, the instructor taught us to think of carving arced shapes with our legs til they become weapons, to punch through instead of at our sparring partner. In recent months, I’ve returned to spin classes, and pilates. I’ve been back in the gym out-lifting my pre-illness personal records, making movement play instead of penance, listening to audio books of fantasy stories while driving the same route to dance class that I once white-knuckled to cognitive and physical rehab, still resurrecting myself through repetition and storytelling to ward of the demons.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome