The Year of Doing New Things Badly
2024 was the Year of Doing New Things Badly, testing if I had regained the ability to (re)gain anything, to build proficiency, strength, skill, intelligence, experience, connection. Much of my illness was an ouroboros of repetitive failure: working memory, muscle memory, and spatial memory all turning over new leafs in the unrefreshing night. No matter how many times I limped around my neighbourhood, I still had moments of terrifying disorientation and forgetting my own address.
When you only have the capacity to do the bare minimum of survival, every day the video game of life resets: there are no extra spoons to meal prep or deep clean to compensate for household failures, to catch up with loved ones enough to compensate for your disappearance, to stay up late to finish a task. Last New Year’s was the first real party I went to since pre-pandemic, struggling to put faces to names and keep them pinned to my brain in the morning, years after most people came out of hibernation and trauma-bonded with their first new post-2020 friends or merged household pods. January, my first time back in the gym doing anything more than maintaining basic functionality for emergencies.
February, my first time inviting a lover to sleepover and see the after-life of a day’s effort — cushioned by necessity by days of rest between ventures — to ask whatever curious questions she wanted about this curse. April, my first in person conference talk, standing at a podium. June, my first real attempt at sport of any kind, since I learned the hard way in 2020 not to push my body.
The monstrous half-life is speculative literature’s favourite metaphor: the secret threat of creatures that look well but turn sick in the night or under stress, the undead disruption to ordinary life, the invisible blight on the beautiful girl. I lumbered out of the dark room of illness, dressed in a slight-of-hand to distract from the gauntness of ill health and the mangled words of someone ill-practiced in meeting strangers, an embarrassment of fever crowning my head.
I still haven’t managed to take a formal class, or polish my foreign languages, but I can retain enough information to read sequels or watch multiple seasons of a show, to learn on the job and off, to remember new friends’ names and pets and hobbies. I can still be knocked off kilter by a fresh virus or the exertional overreach of an argument or a workout, but the depth of the dire strait is raised and I don’t revert to fully bedbound anymore.
I am spending most of my days now in the Land of the Living, learning what I can build if I do something every week or every day, what muscles flex harder through practice, what connections solidify. Community, like strength or skill, is built slowly and through repetitive motion and interlaced connections. You show up and see-and-be-seen, ask follow-up questions, broach silences, brave the social gauntlet until you find friendly faces or turn them warm with interest, a lattice of fresh introductions and old contacts.
I don’t know exactly what I will do with this series going forward. But there is always new research, new data, new infections, new horrors, new readers finding me, and I’m far better placed now then when I started this project to read the science and calculate the odds. As I wrote last Spring: "I know no better way to solve a complex problem than to learn it intimately, and the systems it lives or dies in, inside out, until I could document it on the back of my eyelids, and the undersides of my sick-bed sheets, on the dark walls of the “dark room” Lucia Lorenzi names the isolation and overwhelm of neuro-immunological illness. To use words to make a spell out of the archive of my and others’ memories and experiences.”
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.