How Lockdown Helped Make Me Healthier
This is not a feel-good story about the pandemic, as much as it is a silver-lining story. It’s a story of emerging from Melbourne’s severe lockdown – from months of feeling scared to go to a supermarket, of seizing the one legally-mandated hour of exercise a day, of having more print masks than print frocks in my wardrobe – to find that, surprisingly, I was healthier than I had been when I went in. Greyer, yes. Hairier, yes. More in need of a facial than ever, yes – but healthier, nevertheless.
Here’s how it went down. When we started hearing about this strange new disease in January, I was already several weeks into a health kick. Fed up of not being able to walk for longer than 20 minutes without my back announcing that it was unhappy and it was time to go home, I’d joined a Keiser gym and had signed up to a healthy eating app. It was working. I was logging 10,000 steps a day, slowly shedding kilos. Then, just as I could fit into clothes that hadn’t had an airing in years, COVID kicked in and my work dried up.
I’d spent the past 20 years as a freelance journalist, always with a queue of stories in the works. Cover stories, feature articles: all of it gone. Some magazines closed down; others went into hibernation. Those that kept ticking couldn’t afford to hire freelancers anymore. I panicked, yes. But I also had a lot of time on my hands – and I started to notice things.
I paid more attention to what was happening with my body. Take my recurring stomach cramps. I’d been trying to find a reason for them, intermittently, for years. Nothing had worked, so I’d eventually given up. With the extra hours that lockdown gifted me, I had time to probe deeper.
I joined Facebook groups for women my age. I listened to podcasts. I researched. I had time to do blood tests and attend medical consultations by phone. Ordinarily, a visit to a specialist would have taken chunks out of my day: the long car trip to the city, the time spent sitting in the waiting room. During this pandemic, however, I could arrange telehealth appointments, my specialist calling me while I was preparing dinner. I could keep slicing up the pumpkin for the soup while I was on the call. I managed to fit multiple appointments into one week. I saw a naturopath, a doctor specialising in functional integrative medicine, an endocrinologist, a dermatologist. I hit up every symptom I had with every possible solution that occurred to me.
All roads led to gluten. After a Goop podcast and a hundred Facebook group posts and advice from a Chinese herbalist, I decided to try eliminating it from my diet. I’d experienced such whims in the past, all of them trampled by the lure of sourdough toast in the morning. But with the pandemic raging, I had given up so much already: my freedom, trips to the hairdresser, high heels, takeaway food. I was ready to give up more.
“My daily piccolo was the first thing to go. Then other things were banished: alcohol, soy, dairy. I noticed changes. My face became tauter. My focus seemed better. I had more energy. As the world around me was altering unrecognisably, I was becoming unrecognisable to myself. And I felt good, perhaps for the first time in years. ”
My daily piccolo was the first thing to go. I was too nervous to join the queue of caffeine addicts at my local coffee shop, all of them standing less than two metres apart as they waited for their hit of java. Then other things were banished: alcohol, soy, dairy. I noticed changes. My face became tauter. My focus seemed better. I had more energy. As the world around me was altering unrecognisably, I was becoming unrecognisable to myself. And I felt good, perhaps for the first time in years.
With my body feeling good, I yearned to feel good in every single way possible. I started to meditate again, remembering how much my life improved when I’d done some meditation decades back. Why did I stop? Who knows. I started, sitting, supported by cushions every morning, repeating the mantra that I’d learnt so long ago. I wasn’t entirely sure I was saying the right thing.
I tried to remember the things that made me happy. I played board games with my children. I laughed. I dusted off old novels that had absorbed me in my university days and read them again. Instead of sending celebrity gossip to friends, I’d send Edith Wharton quotes. I rediscovered poetry and the joy of apple slices, dipped occasionally in honey and sometimes sprinkled with added crushed nuts.
I began writing letters to friends, partly because I couldn’t catch up in person with anyone who lived more than five kilometres away, but mostly because my friends responded with delight and joy when they opened the fat envelopes they received, stuffed with pages of handwriting and musings and often sealed with wax. (My postmaster later told me that the reason my letters were so delayed was because the sorting machine hated those wax seals.) I kept writing but because I wasn’t being paid for my writing as often as before, I returned to projects that I’d been nursing for too long, writing in ways that pleased only me.
None of this went unnoticed. I’d walk with the friends who did live nearby and despite the mandatory masks and social distancing, they’d inevitably say, “You seem so different!” I found it easier to open up. I realised I hadn’t been that happy, I told them. I was happier now.
With restrictions easing and the year drawing to a close, so many of us are wondering: what has this year – a year that has been terrible for so many, that has brought isolation, illness, death, economic suffering, political unrest, depression – taught us?
For me, I’ve learnt the importance of individual responsibility, of quality of life, of taking a step back. I’ve learnt that there aren’t lessons in everything, but there are unexpected lessons in unlikely corners. I’ve learned to appreciate things – my friend went for her first cafe outing in months and said that sipping out of a porcelain cup was an experience that was almost religious. Even more, however, I’ve come to appreciate the less tangible: waking up without a sore back, for instance. I’ve been reminded about how pleasurable life can be. And although I won’t miss the pandemic bubble days, I won’t regret them.
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Photos_ Mirko Bozic & Chuttersnap/UnSplash