Navigating (Dis)Closure During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Kristi Murray Costello
What My Partner Sees:
There’s a scene from my trajectory with Long COVID that I fear that, at one time in my life, I might have heralded as an exemplification of my dedication to my profession that now I find incredibly sad and illustrative of my unhealthy relationship with work. I had revisions on an article due late July of 2020. I had already asked for an extension in hopes that I would be well enough, at some point, to complete it, but as my health complications became even more complicated and started complicating one another, I could barely make it through my day-to-day work as a WPA, much less anything extra. I felt behind in my scholarly productivity and had no idea when I would be able to write from scratch again, so it seemed ridiculous, reckless even, to not complete a project that was already so far along.
There was a time that these revisions would have been no problem. I would have likely procrastinated for a week or so but then set aside a couple of afternoons a week before they were due and sent them in on or before the due date. Then, I’d give myself a pat on the back, get some takeout, and spend one night relaxing before turning my attention to my next project. This system wasn’t ideal or the healthiest, but it worked when I was able-bodied. This time around, though, I had two eye infections, and the medicated drops made my vision cloudy. Plus, I couldn’t stare at a computer screen for long without it inducing a migraine, which would then also sometimes trigger a seizure, so I used a blue-light filter and a screen-reading plug in. I had limited mobility and function in my right hand, which made typing tough, so I was learning to write and revise using dictation. My short-term memory was pretty much nonexistent, so I had trouble remembering more than one paragraph of text at a time. And I was still experiencing seemingly random bouts of tachycardia and blood pressure swings, which meant I wasn't supposed to work longer than 20 to 30 minutes at a time, which was fine because, to prevent clotting and blood pooling, I wasn’t supposed to sit for much longer than that anyway. I share all of this not for sympathy, but to illustrate a point that I hope you came to on your own in a way that I didn’t at the time: I had no business working.
My partner pleaded with me to tell the editors that I couldn’t do the revisions due to health issues and they could publish the piece as is or pull it, but I was insistent that it had to be done, desperate even, so eventually, my partner sat by my side in the dark with the laptop on his lap. He read each comment aloud and the text connected to it, and I gave him directions for revisions while trying my best not to look directly at the screen. He helped me keep track of what had and hadn’t been said, which larger revisions were and weren’t being addressed, and which words I had used too recently to be used again.
It was not an efficient system.
After a couple of hours of revisions, he closed the laptop and turned to me, “I don’t get it. Why is this so important?” At the time, all I could say was, “I don’t know, it just is.” In hindsight, I know I was afraid of the gap that COVID would bring to my CV, and, if I made it through COVID, I didn’t want to be any more behind than I was already surely going to be. I wanted a career to come back to. Perhaps even more scary to me though was a question I wasn’t ready to answer: If I was no longer someone who could write, who was I?
The editors knew that I was ill but had no idea just how sick, in part because I hadn’t told them. When I submitted my revisions, I made no reference to how difficult they had been, though I sometimes wonder how they would have responded if I had. I wonder if they would have accepted the piece as is, given me more time, or offered to help. I wonder if they would have felt uncomfortable, inconvenienced, or maybe even annoyed that I was putting them in this situation. What I wonder, perhaps most of all, is why I continue to protect people from themselves and deprive them of the opportunity to respond compassionately and appropriately. Of course, then, I remember my colleague's emailed response to my disclosing my disability ("LOL"). In not disclosing my needs and struggles, I was also protecting myself from the hurt that results from having my vulnerability met with dismissal, skepticism, and rejection.
I am lucky to have a partner who lets me know when I’m not being good to myself and doesn’t follow it up with an “I Told You So” when he's right (Spoiler alert: he's annoyingly ALWAYS right about this). We have brought Christine Miserandino’s metaphor into our daily lives, measuring and allotting my time, tasks, and energy in spoons, and the most he will say is “Are you sure you have the spoons for that?” Unlike my co-workers, my editors, or even my family and friends, he knows that I start each day with a finite number of spoons, and every task, no matter how small, every meeting, no matter how short, and every conversation, no matter how lovely, takes spoons. He knows which medicines and supplements add spoons and which take them away. Pretending to feel better than I do takes more spoons, and taking on work that isn’t absolutely necessary takes unnecessary spoons. We now know too that the first six months of post-viral syndrome is pivotal in determining how and how long the body will need to heal and recover, and I was not good to my body during this time. I look back now at those two long evenings when my partner, after working all day as a therapist, served as my eyes, my hands, and my memory just so that I could make a deadline that now seems inconsequential, and I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for him to watch someone he cares for so much put so little care back into themselves. It surely depleted any spoons he had.