Fall out

Last fall, I took a hard fall. Full-on face-plant wipe-out. On pavement. I saw stars for several minutes after Matt pulled me back to my feet. I immediately knew my cheekbone was going to bruise, and that bruise wouldn’t be the only one. The lens of my glasses got scratched; if I hadn’t been wearing a mask, my face would have been scraped up, too. I had jammed a wrist and slammed a knee on the way down, trying to catch myself.

I had fallen because there was a huge (3”+ diameter) rock in the middle of the paved walkway; I wasn’t looking down because who needs to look at dry pavement? Also, looking down and breathing while wearing a mask and glasses means you may as well not look down because your glasses will fog and you won’t be able to see anything anyway. My foot had landed squarely on the rock, the rock had spun out from under the ball of my foot, sending the rock spinning, turning my ankle, and my momentum throwing me face-first into the asphalt. And there were witnesses. Because my body didn’t hurt enough, apparently I had to have a shame storm, too.

We continued into the store, because we still needed the hardware we came for. I could feel the bruise on my face spreading behind my mask, but I had to walk it off. Adrenaline waned by the time we got back to the car, and that’s when the panic attack hit. I had no idea why or how I fell the way I did. I was in pain. I was embarrassed. And the first time I ventured out of my house in days, I had fallen flat on my face.

Over the next several weeks, all of this pain worked itself out in weird ways. It was like an uncomfortable game of whack-a-mole: one body part would hurt and require rest or ice or some therapeutic for a few days, and just as that pain waned, another pain would emerge. As soon as the ankle started feeling better, then the wrist would take over. Once the wrist finally relaxed and started moving better, then the knee felt worse, even though that bruise was starting to fade. The pattern continued through shoulder, neck, cheekbone, elbow, etc… with some of them re-entering the line-up if I used it too much trying to rest something else. It took nearly a month to move without pain from strained soft tissue or jammed joints. I walked it off, but it took a long time. It hurt over and over and over again.

Honestly, that’s what 2021 felt like for me, too.

COVID-19, again. Walk it off.

Hope for a vaccine. Vaccines get approved! And they are really great! But you can’t take it. Or the other one. Or the other other one. Or the one that is still in testing made from moths. Walk it off.

That reason you can’t take the vaccine? It’s probably been poisoning you slowly for years. Exposure coming from everything that you ingest, clean with, or apply to your skin. Trash or donate an entire carload of products; spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours trying to find safe replacements. Walk it off.

But there’s COVID treatments now! This way, if you DO get it, you won’t get seriously ill. You can’t take those either. Walk it off.

Had to go into a store, had an anaphylactic reaction to the spray in the store bathroom. Walk it off.

Visit a family member’s house. Encounter aerosolized PEG you had previously told them you couldn’t be around. Everyone but you seems surprised when you have to leave abruptly. Walk it off.

You physically feel so much better than you have in years and you actually want to go all the places and do all the things (as opposed to the years you had to plan to save your spoons ahead of time, deal with the exhaustion and pain, and schedule time to recover afterwards). Only the number of places you can safely go could be counted on one hand. You grieve regaining your health and losing your freedom simultaneously. Walk it off.

Take-out is probably making you sick because there’s poison in the detergent they wash the utensils in, transferring to your food that isn’t cooked to a certain temperature. So no more raw food unless you make it yourself. Or 95% of dairy. Or most breads. Or anything that is a mixture that doesn’t say it has to be shaken well. Walk it off.

Between everything aerosol that is just *gestures vaguely* around and used so liberally in so many spaces, so many cleaners that linger in closed bathrooms, and no way of knowing who/what you’ll encounter, you have to accept you’ll likely never get to fly anywhere ever again. You grieve trips you wanted to take, friends you wanted to see, experiences you dreamed of having. Walk it off.

Delta variant is exponentially worse and you can’t be treated – better continue to stay safe at home. Walk it off.

Flying is out, but you could road trip? If you trust the people in your car, you could road trip! But hotels are full of chemicals and you can’t avoid those. And there’s no way to tell if there will be safe places to eat along the way or once you get there. You’d have to figure out how to prepare and transport all your own food, while somehow keeping it safe to eat. Walk it off.

But what about an AirBNB? Yes, you would have to pay for an extra night for the AirBNB so all the cleaners can off-gas, take all your own linens, and thoroughly clean the bathrooms and the kitchen as soon as you get there. Which isn’t a guarantee there won’t be something there you react to the minute you walk in the door. Which doesn’t sound much like a vacation or a rest or a break from the daily exhaustion of the drama either. You grieve the opportunity to step away, even for a weekend. Walk it off.

Great news – the vaccines defend really well against Delta! You start to cautiously plan gatherings with friends who you trust not to bring the plague to a party, and then have to continually cancel or reschedule because the weather is bad or someone got exposed at work. Walk it off.

You watch as friends and family announce their vaccine status and feel safe to start resuming parts of their lives from the ‘before times’. You’re so relieved for them, but also, grieve your inability to rejoin them. You fear that there is no ‘new normal’ for you. Walk it off.

You catch friends in lies about their exposures to COVID or their vaccination status. Accept they don’t value your life over their delusion or comfort. Walk it off.

You realize you’ve been gaslit by someone you trusted, as they admonished YOU for ‘living in fear’ when you’re just following WHO guidelines and trying to make it to your next birthday. Walk it off.

You celebrate a milestone birthday and milestone anniversary by staying in and cooking an ordinary meal, after spending most of the day alone. Walk it off.

Your parents both have Delta and there’s nothing you can do to help without endangering yourself. You tell yourself porch-dropping groceries and driving to another area code with a phone charger so your dad can have one in the hospital counts as doing something. Walk it off.

You have to start unfollowing and deleting people from your social media feeds (your only link to the outside world, at this point) because the misinformation about COVID, the vaccine, the government, and the state of the world is just too much for your mental health. And then you see yet another post calling those who do such things petty and lamenting ‘why can’t we just get along and respect everyone’s individual choices?’ Because all of your choices could kill me – and now have threatened the lives of my parents. Walk it off.

Your dad nearly dies of COVID. The doctors don’t understand how he’s still alive. He isn’t really aware of what’s happening, sedated so he can rest and fight, for days. You don’t feel safe to go to the hospital and visit, do you? Walk it off.

You continue to watch your country act like everything is fine while thousands of people are dying every day a mostly preventable death, and wanna-be dictators and traitors try to run your government into the ground. But everyone is mad about Mr. Potato Head not being a Mister anymore? Walk it off.

You watch educated, but misled, people suffer so much loss when they eschew a vaccine you would be more than happy to take if you could. Walk it off.

Omicron. It’s everywhere. Vaccines still protect really well against death, but breakthrough cases are more and more common. It could still kill you. Walk it off.

You cautiously look to the holidays, trying not to be a humbug, as everyone plans holiday gatherings. You have panic attacks and hoard tests, hoping everyone will be honest about the results so you can be included. Walk it off.

There were betrayals; some were small and others caught me just as off guard as that stinking rock. There was tearful radical acceptance of those betrayals. There were so many disappointments. There was a lot of grief, coming up like whack-a-mole, at the strangest of times, in the oddest of ways. There isn’t enough self-care in the world to combat what 2021 did to me.

So I take a deep breath, cry some more, and walk it off.