It’s been a really long time since I put anything new on this page.  I have sat down at my desk and fired up my laptop multiple times, but no words have come forth.

It’s been maddening, but I’ve been feeling a need to reemerge from my self-imposed exile and I want to pick up the pieces that I had to let go.

It’s been a long 5 years.  I’ll quickly try to catch you up on the major events that lead to me pulling back from writing, hosting the monthly gatherings and book club.

One of the main reasons I stopped writing, was a feeling of complete and utter overwhelm.  So much happened all at once.  The world suffered an epic pandemic that was mismanaged from the very beginning.  While trying to learn to maneuver my way through covid, I found myself living in the literal epicenter of a global revolution.

  I live 1 1/2 blocks from the intersection where George Floyd was murdered, and needless to say, the face of my neighborhood changed dramatically.  I can literally stand in my front yard and see the large metal statue of a giant fist that marks the entrance to the ongoing occupation that is George Floyd Square.

During the uprising in Minneapolis, I had a front row seat to the protests, many which marched in the street in front of my house.  While a barricade of pallets, couches and garbage cans was going up a block away from my house, the smoke from two burning police stations and other buildings on the four mile stretch of Lake Street floated into my neighborhood.  Three helicopters circled my neighborhood around the clock for months.  At one point, I allowed 16 of my friends and a few kind hearted strangers to board up my house and I took refuge in a hotel in an outer ring suburb of Minneapolis in order to clear my head, sleep without noise canceling headphones, and come up with a plan to postpone my yoga teacher training  I was supposed to start the day after the riots broke out and to figure out how to reopen my studio after lockdown was lifted.

When I finally made it back to my house five days later, I had to learn to live with an armed militia patrolling the “Free State of George Floyd which still encompasses four square blocks of my neighborhood.  I had to get used to the 540% increase in violent crime that came with living on the boarder of a no-police zone.  I don’t want to get into the gory details of what I experienced, for my sake as well as for my readers.  I’ll just say that it was a very intense time in my life that left some deep scars on my soul.

The Square became a bittersweet part of my life.  I understood the protest, and I did what I could to support it by donating water and firewood to the People’s Way which formed under the awning of the abandoned Speedway gas station. I hugged complete strangers as I stood in a huge crowd there and heard Chauvin’s guilty verdict announced.  I listened to speakers central to the Civil Rights Movement when they appeared at The Square, and I attended covid cautious neighborhood gatherings that taught us about the historical significance of my Southside Minneapolis neighborhood and it’s place in the fight for civil rights.  However, the occupation came with a lot of very frightening experiences that I am still learning to come to terms with as I explore them with the guidance of my therapist under the diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

The uprising in Minneapolis was my third riot.  I escaped Los Angeles with my infant son as the worst of the rioting hit the city after the police beating of Rodney King.  Sixteen years later I was caught up in the RNC riots in Saint Paul.  I never imagined that fourteen years later I’d be boarding up my house to escape Minneapolis as it burned.

Then I caught covid. 

In July of 2021 I went to an outdoor music festival with my boyfriend to celebrate our birthday weekend.  Knowing that I work so closely with clients, we were careful to maintain our covid protocol.  The motorcycle trip to South Dakota was beautiful, but we rode home through thick smoke from Canadian wildfires that had drifted southward.  I made an appointment to get a covid test before returning to work, just to make sure my stuffy head and watery eyes were from the smoke and not the virus, and received a positive covid test result on my birthday.

While I didn’t require hospitalization, I rode through the delta wave infection with some pretty rough symptoms.  I remember walking through my house all night long during the worst of it, because I feared I would drown in my congested lungs if I allowed myself to sleep.  My quarantine lasted 21 days as I was still showing symptoms and testing positive at the 15-day mark.

I never felt like I fully recovered from covid.

I found myself needing extreme amounts of sleep.  I struggled to make it through a day of work and had to drastically cut my schedule of clients in order to nap in between sessions.  On multiple occasions I would pull into a parking lot on my 40- minute commute home from the studio just to sleep for half an hour because I was so exhausted. I found myself searching for words that used to flow so easily.  I couldn’t walk a flight of stairs without having to rest half way up because I would become so dizzy and breathless.  My hands and feet would swell and my entire spine burned.

I asked my doctor to test me for mono and Lyme’s disease, but received negative results.  Finally, after suffering for months, I was admitted into the long haul covid clinic at my county hospital. I spent 8 months working with a respiratory therapist and a year and a half with a neuro-cardiac therapist learning how to manage my many symptoms. 

My journey with long haul covid is still on going.  Since October of 2021, I have been poked, prodded, tested, evaluated and reviewed multiple times.  Covid caused dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, syncope and mast cell activation syndrome. I can’t stand for long periods of time, because I get very dizzy.  My heart rate will soar or plumet for no reason.  I can’t regulate my body temperature anymore, especially in very hot or very cold temperatures.  Sometimes I pass out if I stand too long or if I get too hot or too cold.  My skin erupts with tiny blisters seemingly for no reason.  Sometimes my throat forgets how to swallow.  My spine often feels like it’s on fire. Sometimes my joints swell up. Sometimes I have tremors.  My optic nerve is inflamed and my left eye shakes and often refuses to come into focus.   I’m easily overwhelmed and my foggy brain often can’t handle simple tasks.  I use a roller walker now, when I used to walk my dogs 5 miles each day.   This is just a short list on-going symptoms that make every day a new adventure.

When it gets really tough, I remind myself that I survived a virus that has killed over six million people world-wide, but there are still days I mourn the person I was before I got sick.  It’s not been easy to learn to live with a damaged autonomic nervous system.

At this point, I’m doing my best to learn to live with my symptoms.  The medical community is still shaking their heads at those of us who never fully recovered from covid.  If I had a dollar for every time a doctor told me that they just don’t know enough about covid, I’d probably be able to pay off some of my ever-looming medical bills that I’ve incurred since I got sick.  I’ve taken part in four studies on long covid and the  dysautonomia it caused, and I keep searching for more.

I found my way back to art during the pandemic.  I needed a way to ground myself during the chaos of the uprising amidst the lockdown and began sculpting, beading again and doing metal work again.  My artwork has been supplementing my income since I’ve had to cut back on my hours of doing bodywork.  I’m often seen at local art shows and maker markets, and I opened an Etsy store.  I’m looking forward to writing about the work I’m creating here in the future.

I completed my Kriya yoga teacher training that I began the week the uprising started, but because of my dysautonomia, I had to adjust my yoga practice so I don’t get too dizzy or pass out.  I’m not taking my long walks with the dogs anymore because I’ve passed out while walking them.  Luckily, I wear a cross-body harness that I clipped their leashes onto, and they were still attached to me when I woke up.  Even simple tasks can cause syncope, and my neighbors are caring enough to peek over the fence when they know I’m gardening or shoveling snow, because they have either witnessed my syncope or heard about the experience through the neighborhood grapevine.  I’m so lucky to have such good friends around me.

Many of those good friends have been asking when I’ll be bringing back my blog. 

Honestly, writing has been hard.  Brain fog and brain fatigue have been some of the most challenging symptoms of long covid.  My words used to come to me so easily.  Now, finding the right ones is challenging and sometimes, very frustrating.  I miss getting my ideas out on paper though.  I always felt better when I sat back and read what I wrote, and from the emails I’ve received since starting this blog, quite a few of you have felt better after reading my work too.

So, I’m making a promise to myself, with you as my witness, that I will sit down and write more often.  I’ll allow myself some grace when it gets overwhelming, but I won’t let being uncomfortable keep me from expression.  I’ve already tucked a new notebook into my backpack so I have a place to scribble ideas and inspiration. 

So, in the words of John Wick, “People keep asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now yeah, I’m thinking I’m back”