Thoughts on what it's like when the body you've never particularly liked anyway stops working

I've never been athletic. By the time I was a teenager, there were already mountains of evidence of this from the various sports my parents signed me up for.

As a proud member of the Blueberries softball team, I excelled at picking dandelions in the outfield while balls thudded into the grass beyond my reach or my interest. When I played basketball, the best I could hope for was to survive my time on the court with minimal embarrassment or exertion.

I liked soccer—maybe more the fact that it was a fringe sport in my football-and-basketball worshipping Hoosier community than any real passion—but excellence avoided me. Being a subpar piece of a team always left me feeling out of place and unwanted, no matter how many participation trophies my millennial child self garnered.

Still, I was active. I was restless, roaming the woods that fringed our property and the eastern edge of the town. I walked, waded, and wandered. I enjoyed Taekwondo for the small amount of time my family could afford lessons. Around town, I rode my bike (after ditching my helmet in the neighbors bushes past my parents' line of sight) or trespassed on the local retirement community's parking lot, reveling in the feel of the smooth, black asphalt beneath my rollerblades.

As an adult, I've struggled with activity and fitness. On one hand, I maintained my love of the outdoors. On the other hand, I struggled with stamina, heat intolerance (for summer activities), the discipline (and financial stability) needed to justify something like a gym membership, and a general unhappiness with my physical form and its abilities.

When Trump was elected for the first time, a grad school friend and I committed to a kind of leftist prepperism, researching survival strategies, acquiring gear, and going on backpacking trips to test our resilience in the wilderness. During this time, inspired by the need to have a functioning body if society went under, I even jogged regularly for several months—a first that has yet to be repeated (and I'm not looking to do so tbh. Running sucks.).

A lot happened in my life in the ten years between then and now. I got my master's degree. I lived through the excruciatingly slow collapse of a marriage and the liberation of a divorce. I began experiencing health issues that I did not understand and could not predict, affecting my ability to work or feel capable. I met someone kinda cool that I've decided to keep around for the past 7 years.

And then COVID-19 crashed into me with all the delicacy of a freight train manned by a cartoon villain aiming to drive my entire life off a goddamn cliff.

That's when I was forced to get to know my body, the thing that had carried me for nearly 30 years, that I had viewed over the years with ambivalence, frustration, loathing, disappointment, carelessness, and so many other uncomfortable, critical feelings.

As I lost the ability to catch my breath—as my oxygen saturation dipped, my energy levels plummeted, as other functions tipped like dominoes—I understood that I was stretched beneath my skin like a hand in a glove, unable to extricate myself from something that was no longer working in a way that it should, in a way that would allow me to experience life with any sense of autonomy.

Many people have it worse, life is suffering, etc. But being on oxygen in your late 20s sucks. I was supposed to be hitting my stride in my career, but instead, I struggled to keep up with expectations at work and to hold jobs.

I was supposed to be happy, active, and established. Instead, my life was defined by fatigue. By the sound of an oxygen concentrator humming in the house like a jet engine 24/7. By the leash of oxygen cannula tying me to something my body should have been doing on its own.

It hurt. I wasn't just angry; I was furious. I took my frustration out on the people in my life, including the partner who always made sure we had spare oxygen tanks when we went out, who took on the bulk of expenses and home management, who was dealing with his own conclusion that this wasn't what he had expected in a relationship, either.

And I kept getting sick. All the time. Fevers. Respiratory infections. Pneumonia. All of it damaging my lungs even more while my PCP shrugged and my pulmonologist threw antibiotics and steroids at my system for years—none of them looking for a deeper cause. (By the way, being on powerful steroids for years straight is great! It definitely doesn't cause aggression, sleep deprivation, weight gain, and who knows what else. Highly recommend!)

I think about the fact that I was never athletic, never prioritized my body, and was always more inclined to dwell on and in my own internal world, juxtaposed with the irony that I was forced to think, literally, of every breath I took, the limitations of my damaged organs and fatigued muscles, and the consequences of oxygen deprivation to the entire physical system.

I imagine a person locked in a small room for two years would feel similarly. I became intensely, intimately familiar with the symptoms and signs my body gave me, like our hypothetical detainee knowing the number of tiles in a ceiling or the way the cracks in the paint look like the state of South Carolina or the exact sound of the house settling at night. Think The Yellow Wallpaper vibes (IYKYK).

I learned myself in a way that I'd never wanted to and that most don't need to. A limit pushed too far, the first fever hinting at an infection, the catch in my chest telling me my oxygen is too low. I can diagnose my own pneumonia as certainly as any CT scan, and far more certainly than X-rays, which miss a lot more than you would think.

I turned down outings that I knew would be too strenuous and leave me drained for days. I missed out on things I would have otherwise enjoyed. I can't tell you what I've lost. I never got the opportunity to know.

I still don't know why I was eventually able to come off the oxygen; nothing significant changed in my treatment plan. But being diagnosed with common variable immune deficiency (CVID) last September was a game-changer.

After 10 months on immunoglobulin replacement therapy, I don't get sick every couple of weeks. The ground glass opacities in my lungs have essentially resolved. Things still aren't ideal—I have bronchiectasis, and my lung capacity is around 17%, and I have oodles of other health issues—but I am finally undergoing competent treatment.

And I can do so much more than I used to be able to do, or cared to do.

I worry sometimes about being too fixated on health. It's not a personality trait, after all. But I've realized I don't care about being perceived that way. If you don't have to think about it, you're lucky. Take that shit for granted while you can. I wish I had thought to do that instead of indulging insecurities about my physique and physical abilities for so many years.

Now, I make it a priority to use my body, regardless of how it looks or how well it does something. For around a year and a half, I've gone to yoga classes twice a week, health permitting.

(My studio is closing its doors, and tonight was my last class, which is part of why all this is on my mind. I can't really say how grateful I am to Shine Yoga Studio, Robin, Larissa, and the other instructors for helping me build this habit and learn my practice. And to Jacki C. Moseley, fellow immune system victim, for inviting me in the first place.)

I take the dogs on inconsistent neighborhood walks (3 dogs is a lot to handle, okay?). When the weather's nice, Ken and I take our kayaks out on the water. We camp. I just joined a local, women-only weightlifting gym—Honey's Barbell—and while I don't know what I'm doing yet, and feel pain for days after each class, I'm fucking ecstatic that it's even an option.

I am not, and likely will never be, a paragon of fitness. I still have no interest in team sports or bougie trendy one-on-one sports like pickleball or even single"sports" like golf, even though I have a set of clubs and always tell Ken, "Sure, we should go to the course sometime!"

But each of the activities I participate in requires oxygen to make it from the air to my lungs to my blood to my muscles. It requires me to make a choice to do something that I am capable of doing, even if it is difficult and my execution is bad.

I've learned this balancing act, now, of challenging my body and accommodating it. I can't ignore it now, and I can't take it for granted. My only option is to keep moving.