WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, Psychologist, fellow long hauler and your long COVID coach, and welcome to another Wellness Wednesday. It's been a few weeks since we've had a Wellness Wednesday, I've been out on vacation and before that I think we also skipped a week. And I was super looking forward to being rejuvenated by my vacation and coming back, hitting the ground running with all kinds of new things in my business, including these videos. And of course, as always happens with long COVID when we anticipate something, I wound up getting huge pam as a result of jetlag when I got back on Thursday and have been pretty sick over the weekend. And I also got an email from my assistant on Thursday giving her notice. So I'm feeling a little despondent and kind of disillusioned if that's the right word, which is completely understandable. And I have been spending the weekend feeling my feelings and curling up like ball, which I know you've heard me talk about a lot as strategies that are important for us with long COVID. If you want to learn more about those strategies, I will put the links to other videos where I have spoken about the more underneath.

But I am therefore trying to obviously lean into my symptoms and take care of myself. But I really wanted to talk about today, the situation with my business and assistance. Maybe not because you're running a business and you are looking for assistant but because it kind of really matches with a topic in long COVID that we all talk about a lot. And something that people have been asking me about recently, and so it makes sense to kind of tie the two together. So you may or may not know, before I started working with long COVID January 21. I have been in private practice at that point for gosh, six years. And a big part of my business was training and consultation for other mental health professionals. So I had an assistant who had been working with me for about nine months. And as I transitioned into working with long COVID, obviously, the business changed quite considerably. And she was someone who had a good expertise in online courses and software that online courses are hosted in. And I wasn't doing so much of that anymore. And it made sense to transition to somebody else. Now, since that time, which was March 21. I've actually lost count, but I think I have been through probably around 12 different assistants. And that's not to say that each month I've had a new one because at various points in time, I have two or three different people working in my business doing different things.

But it has been a bit of a rough journey. And sure there are a lot of factors that go into finding a good fit for virtual assistants. But one of the things that is really relevant to long COVID is understanding disability. And this is something that I know, we talk a lot about that now that we live with this thing that the rest of the world doesn't really understand. It puts our friendship groups and our colleagues and our family into two categories. The people that get it and the people that don't get it. And it's completely understandable. If you don't live with disability if you don't know somebody intimately who has long COVID or MECFS or some other autoimmune or chronic illness. It is really difficult to understand what we're experiencing. And I have tried different permutations of hiring people in my business. I have hired people who have personal lived experience of MECFS and autoimmune and of course, the difficulty there is, as an employer, I'm not their Psychologist so I can't it's an ethical violation for me to have a dual role with somebody. So I can't offer advice about managing their chronic illness. And very often, what happens is that they're not really super familiar with the polyvagal theory and the strategies that I utilize. And so they quite frequently get overwhelmed, and burnt out and wind up quitting. And that has happened a couple of times with people with that type of experience or the alternative is that I hire somebody who has no personal experience. Excuse me. Joys of being back in New York is that allergy season is on steroids here.

Yes, so if you hire somebody who is able-bodied, then of course, the understanding of our experience is very difficult to put across. And of course, there are those unicorns and you may have them in your family or your friendship group, who don't have lived experience themselves, but who do get what we're going through. But the vast majority of people in the world do not. And it's completely understandable when I was pre-COVID. Even as a Psychologist, often working with people with disability, I realized now that I did not get it at all. And I did operate in a very able-bodied way. And one of the positives, although we don't like to use that word to long COVID is that I now get to understand this world a lot more. And I'm enormously grateful for that.

But I was just reading on Twitter yesterday, a guy had posted a video talking about post-exertional malaise, and how nonsensical it is when you stop and think about trying to describe it to somebody and the words that he had used were. So I tell somebody, that whenever I do any type of activity, however small, I wind up with the flu. And that is basically what post-exertional malaise is, but sometimes we forget that within the community, and we start to talk about it being about fatigue. But actually, that isn't my personal experience. And I imagine it probably isn't your experience either, that what actually post-exertional malaise is, is symptom exacerbation. So it's not that when you've done something, you're tired two or three days later, it's when you've done something, you think you've got COVID again, or you think you've got the flu, or you think you've got a cold or you think you've got some other type of infection. For me, especially with my recent vacation, I've been having hot flashes, chills, body aches, feeling feverish. And it's very easy to think, oh, god, did I get COVID again, but of course, I'm testing negative. And it makes perfect sense that post-exertion symptoms would be flu-like, but how can anybody possibly understand that if they don't have long COVID themselves, and so then it makes it quite difficult operating a business when the staff that you have working for you don't fully really get what we go through on a day to day basis. And some things that I want to share with you that are relevant for your friendship group, your social circle, interpersonal relationships with friends and family. One thing that I definitely have found myself doing over these 12 months is, I find that I get to a point with an assistant and I realize it's not a good fit, but I just don't have the strength to hire somebody else again. And so I continue anyway. And in all honesty, that's what's been happening with this particular one. And it is good for me to hire somebody else who is a better fit. And I think we all do that. You may have a friend who doesn't get it and is particularly draining to your recovery. Who triggers your nervous system or isn't that for you in the ways that you need and yet it feels hard to cut the person out isn't really the right language, but to step away from that friendship and to have time away from them feels difficult. And yet in all honesty, that is what we have to do. Our mitochondria are broken and as a result, we have probably 5% of the energy of available to us that other people have. And we don't want to waste that precious energy on interpersonal relationships that are not serving us, when in all honesty, it's not enough to cover even getting through the shower and making breakfast.

So conserve the tiny bit of energy that you do have, don't waste it on difficult friendships and difficult relationships. And I hear from many, many clients the most difficult one is thinking about marriage, you know, I'm in a marriage that isn't serving me, but I don't have the strength to leave, well, you're not going to recover if you don't leave. And that's a harsh message to hear. And you may not be in that situation in terms of your partnerships. But there may well be a friend or a family member that is super draining, and you do need to step away from them if you are going to recover. And the other thing to remember, and this also applies to colleagues too. It's not our job to explain to anybody our illness, if they don't get it, and they're not willing to do their own research to find out. It's not our job. That was a post on one of the Facebook groups in the last week, somebody was saying they had a difficult interaction with a medical professional, I think it might have been a dentist. And they were saying how should I have explained that to them, you don't need to explain to anybody, if a medical professional is gaslighting you, then you have a responsibility to take care of yourself, you can say things to yourself, to soothe your nervous system and use all the polyvagal strategies to take care of yourself. But you don't need to waste your energy on trying to persuade them that they've got it wrong. That is not our job. And it is the same across the board, whether it's a family member, whether it's a colleague, whether it's a friend, people who want to know what it's like for us we'll do the research, there are books, there are videos, all the things that we are watching and consuming resource wise, are available to everybody. So if they want to find out they can. And I have been surprised, I have friends who are very interested and have done research and are curious to know and are thoughtful, and I have other ones who don't get it and ask me stupid questions. And I don't hang out with them anymore. And that may be painful to hear that our friendship groups will get smaller. But that is okay for now.

And the other thing that I want to highlight, kind of piggybacking off the idea of me trying to hire assistants who also have lived experience, that obviously one of the things that we have available to us within the long COVID community is supporting each other. And the difficulty there is that we also don't have the resources to support each other, we have a responsibility to ourselves, first and foremost. And I have seen various initiatives that involved peer support. And that worries me because when I was super sick, I certainly could not have taken care of somebody else. I was barely able to take care of myself. And so it isn't really fair for us to expect each other to be taking care of us either. Now, don't get me wrong, obviously, it is wonderful to connect with peers for that validation and shared, you know, experience. And I definitely do that. And there are people within the community that I have made great friendships with. But taking it a step further, where the professionals leave us be and expect us to take care of ourselves isn't really fair. And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted as a professional to start working with long COVID as soon as I was well enough. And it's one of the things that I hear most frequently from clients when we first meet, that they just love the fact that I get it. They don't have to explain anything to me. And they know that I know and I can help them. And there are many of us within the community who do have lived experience who are professionals and are serving in that way. And that is really wonderful and helpful. So if you're not getting the support that you need, and you're struggling to explain it to other people maybe consider is there a professional have lived experience that I want to be working with because they will be able to give me that extra level of support without me having to explain it to them.

If you have people in your life that you're thinking of, as I'm describing my experiences this week that are draining your energy and forcing your recovery, maybe my challenge to you this week is to just think about stepping back from those people. And however painful that may be. It is, unfortunately, an important part of what we have to do with our nervous system to take care of ourselves. We are responsible for our own nervous systems. And if we are around other people that are triggering that it's our responsibility to get out of that situation.

I hope you have a tolerable week and I look forward to seeing you again on another Wellness Wednesday. Take care.