This newsletter/blog is about living a meaningful life and is not intended to be sociopolitical commentary. Yet, I have some things I’d like to share that have been in me trying to push their way out - that are sociopolitical commentary. This is the third (and probably final) one of these, so after this will return to the usual astrology-creativity-herbology-et cetera content. In the meantime, skip it if you want, unsubscribe if you want, or continue to read and enjoy. This is a long one. I didn’t see a great way to break it up into shorter pieces, so I’m just going with it.
The audio above is me reading this newsletter, for anyone who prefers to listen than read.
And, one more thing before we get started - Disclaimer (you know the drill): The information contained in this blog are for informational purposes only. No material in this blog is intended as medical advice and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking a new health care regimen, and never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this blog.
“You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.”
-Abbie Hoffman
This is a whole big thing. Where to start? Where to stop? It’s like pulling on one thread of a tapestry, or some other old metaphor. In any case, I said I would share my own covid story this week, after laying the groundwork in a big picture sense, with the last two posts - which I would suggest reading, if you are just jumping in now and haven’t yet.
I couldn’t have written and shared any of this a year ago, or even six months ago. Even thinking about it sent me into a panic. But time has passed, things have changed, and I have changed too.
first off:
I opted out of the covid shot.
This is not meant to be a big reveal, but maybe it is anyway. Most people who know me, know this, and I have never lied about it. You know I am a natural health person and have been since I was a teenager. My reliance on pharmaceuticals of any sort has been very minimal since I had a couple of difficult experiences with them as a young person, and I started looking into what else was out there that I could do to take care of myself and to self-treat if I got sick or had an infection.
But I haven’t written about this topic here or even spoken about it all that much, because it was such a painful, difficult topic - and not related to what I see as the purpose of this blog or my professional work. This subject brought up many people’s sense of survival and safety, on ‘both’ sides. (There’s really always a hundred sides, not just two, but anyway.) This made having a productive conversation nearly impossible. It brought out a lot of very hurtful behavior. I think had I been more secure in myself, it wouldn’t have been so hard for me, but I wasn’t secure. So, it’s not that I’m blaming other people for my own silence, it really has to do with me not being able to handle what would come back at me. In other words, if I wanted to dish it, I had to be able to take it. And I knew I couldn't. I was in no position to listen calmy to someone else or hold space for their emotions when I myself was so activated.
At this point in time, there’s no purpose in me explaining or justifying my choice or to try to convince anyone of anything, regarding this. We are past all that.
We have all done our best and we’ve made the choices we have made. I don’t want to scare anyone or cast doubts in anyone who did get the shot by sharing my own fears. I want people to make their own healthcare decisions. At a basic level, I would not think that what is the right choice for me is necessarily the right choice for someone else.
So here, I’ll share my own story, for those of you who are still reading. And maybe some of you will see yourself in my words and feel seen and that will be healing, and some of you will perhaps have empathy across difference and that will be healing too. And some of you will think I’m a fool, a deluded ‘eco-fascist’ or something, a very bad person, and that is what it is. No way to please everyone.
My Covid Story
March 2020
I came down with a nasty cold that just wouldn’t quit. It turned out many of the people at the coffee shop where I worked got sick too and their experience was about the same as mine. It felt like my body was just grinding the gears, not getting anywhere. I had no fever for six days and my sinuses were swollen shut, forcing me to breathe through my mouth. My whole body ached, I was bored out of my mind and not sleeping much at all because of the pain and the sinus congestion. Normally I didn’t do much when I got sick, just hot water with lemon and honey and fresh garlic added to my soup. I think this is because when I was a kid, we never really took medicine when we were sick, we just ate soup and broth and rested for a week. This always worked well for me. As an adult, I also always made a point of staying home from work because I knew I needed rest and I didn’t want to get my coworkers sick, even though many other people did not have this view and would push through.
Then, just after I got better - I finally got a fever and it broke in the night, and my sinuses were clear, and I had no more pain - then Cait got sick.
At first she was just normal-sick, but after about a week, it took a turn for the worse. This was the second week of March 2020, when everything had shut down and healthy people were sheltering in place and very afraid. That wasn’t us. Cait’s lungs started to make sounds like whale songs and also weird crackling noises like plastic wrap. She told me later that she had been coughing blood and her toenail beds had turned blue. She didn’t tell me these things at the time because it scared her too much. I was not sick anymore, but I was exhausted after my own illness and not very present. But when I listened to her lungs that day, something clicked into gear in my mind: This is pneumonia. People die from this every year. Cait could die. Get your shit together.
We had no way of knowing if it was the new, scary virus or something else. There was no covid testing yet. If it WAS, they had no medicine for it in hospitals so there was no point in going there. If it WASN’T, she could catch that virus on top of whatever this was, and that could be particularly deadly. So going to a doctor or a hospital made no sense.
I called two friends who helped me get a stronger herbal protocol together for her and I got her on it within a couple of hours. By the evening, she was sitting up and laughing with me, telling stories. That night when I put her to bed on the couch, I knew she was going to live.
It took about six months for her to get her lung capacity back. I’ve heard from others that they had the same experience after having pneumonia.
April 2020
We still had no idea if we had covid or not, but it was seeming a bit like we did. I was recovered and ready to help others the way I had helped Cait. I made packets of dried mullein and put various tinctures together and dropped them off at friends’ doorsteps, just in case they ended up needing it. (No one did.) If I had just had this virus, I had immunity, right? I was ready to show up for my community and help out anyone who needed it since it seemed the medical system was entirely unprepared.
But instead, no one acknowledged immunity at all, to the point that I began to question it myself (even though I had studied the immune system in college!) and instead of going out and helping people, we were encouraged to….stay in our homes.
I had all this fire and energy in me. I wanted to help out directly, but I couldn’t see how to do it. Also, no one else I knew was getting sick at that point. I felt that energy pool up and stagnate until I found outlet for it in redecorating my office and moving cinder blocks around and taking an online watercolor class, none of which helped the actual problem, but it kept me sane.
I wondered, What would be the end point, if those of us who had already been sick, were still told to stay home?
Same for wearing masks when we went out. If we had been sick and recovered, how would wearing a mask be helpful to anyone? What would the endpoint be with wearing a mask? Clearly, it was going to be something arbitrary.
Anyone who questioned masking was painted as a villain of the worst degree, which seemed odd because actually we didn’t have much data either way. Would woven cloth really provide protection at all, or was it more symbolic? I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to error on the side of caution, and I didn’t want to upset or scare anyone. People were so scared and had such strong feelings.
It also seemed like the people who didn’t want to wear masks were being rather rude and sure of themselves. I didn’t know how anyone could be so sure of themselves in a situation like that. And yet both sides were, and were quite righteous about it. I’ll put myself in there too. I see how comforting it is, when under stress, to collapse complexity into simple answers and put faith in some simple thing. The ‘anti-maskers’ certainly didn’t do much to win others over to their cause though, blustering about angrily.
Now we get into the territory where we get to talk about Trump for just a minute
This started to make me nervous: Let’s say Donald Trump said he liked avocados. Just mentioned it in passing. If that happened, suddenly all his supporters would start eating them and sharing information about how healthy they are and all the ways you can use them: smoothies! face masks! sandwiches!
Meanwhile nearly everyone who can’t stand him would immediately start boycotting avocados and sharing information about how actually avocados are fatty and horrible for you and all the workers’ rights violations and environmental degradation that occurs because of growing avocados and how much fuel it takes to truck them up from Mexico to New York, and how anyone who buys avocados, given all that, is ignorant, irresponsible, selfish and actually just horrible. The memes would abound.
That is a dangerous situation. You get that, right?
As far as I can tell, Trump has no morals or integrity, saying one thing one day and another thing the next day. I’m not interested in his thoughts or opinions on public health one way or another.
If you set up your belief structure primarily as opposition to that which you don’t want/find appalling/disagree with, you set yourself up to never find what is true or real.
You get stuck on the surface level, in us/them, black/white thinking, always fighting.
This is a boobie trap the contrarian finds themselves in sometimes. And as a contrarian by nature, whether or like it or not, I was already familiar with this one and saw it for what it was. (But that didn’t make me less afraid to have people think I’m a Trump supporter when I’m not.)
Still April 2020
I remember also thinking, surely there are drugs that already exist that would work for this virus, in a pinch?
Surely there are lots of drugs with off-label antiviral use that could be used?
I’m a plant person but for everyone who isn’t, surely there’s something already on hand that would work?
I didn’t know until a year later that was actually a huge topic which I just wasn’t seeing on the news outlets I followed then. When I finally found Dr. Pierre Kory’s work, and saw how it was being received, it broke my heart. It really did. It broke my fucking heart. All the people who died when perhaps they could have lived, had they been given medicine, had they been given oxygen instead of intubated…
The rest of 2020 and early 2021
I was very grateful that I got to go back to work at my same kitchen job after a few weeks, that I wasn’t a knowledge worker who had to stay home, and also that I wasn’t in a place where everything totally shut down. A lengthy general quarantine (actually it’s called a reverse quarantine, when you aren’t sick) never made any sense to me - surely there would be a more elegant and targeted way to care for elders and immune-compromised people, than this? But I didn’t know anything, and still don’t really, about public health.
There was a lot of talk at the time about laborers and people in the service industry being thrown under the bus, while knowledge workers got to look after themselves and stay home, but for myself, and for Cait too, we had no desire whatsoever to stay home and were more than happy to be out in the world again.
I stopped reading the news and spending much time on social media, because it seemed to make my life only worse. I would read news headlines that were clearly just meant to instill fear, and sometimes had little to do with reality. I still feel very badly for buying into that fear to the level I did and not seeing my dad much, or some other family members of mine who are older. I was so afraid of getting my dad sick, meanwhile time was going on, and nothing had changed and he was still home alone, bearing up the best he could, and that didn’t seem right or healthy by any standard, but I didn’t know what to do.
Some things I noticed during this time:
People treated their masks as security blankets. I did too. I realized I enjoyed hiding. When we finally took them off it was a little scary, in a way that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the risk of infection, and everything to do with emotional security.
Cait and I were working out in the world the entire time, after she recovered, her at the clinic and me in a kitchen, but despite our seeing a dozen or more people every day, friends said that we were ‘safe’ to be around. Meanwhile, sometimes other people were seen as unsafe, but it seemed to be for reasons that had nothing to do with covid, and everything to do with their sense of emotional safety with that person. This stood out to me. It was sort of like how people are with STIs. I have seen it many times, the assumption that a ‘good girl’ would never have an STI - which of course made me a ‘bad girl’ instantly when I learned at age 20 that I had HPV. It reminded me of this.
I had never seen ordinary people afraid of getting sick before. I don’t mean people who had serious comorbidities. I mean everyone else. People who used to go to work when they had the flu and get other people sick, who took illness as a normal part of a human life, became deathly afraid of it. It was the strangest thing. It became almost a moral issue, as if by getting sick a person had sinned. And as if there aren’t at least a hundred things a person can do to care for themselves so that illness, when it comes, is manageable…
I was waiting for the masking studies to come out and us to see if and how much masks helped. I was waiting for the drug protocols to come out. I would be waiting a while, it turned out.
Spring - Summer 2021
Generally, I believe more options are good, and I knew lots of people would want to get a vaccine, so my dumb ass was tentatively happy when it first came out in the spring of 2021 and was made available to elders.
I was slightly wary - is this going to get weird? I wondered - but basically, I was hopeful that it would do what it was supposed to - stop the bleed. Cause less severe cases and decrease deaths. My dad got the shot straight away at the VA and I heaved a sigh of relief.
Then things got…interesting…
You know, you were there.
[I don’t know who to attribute this *lovely* image to; I saw it here and there on social media.]
Initially, it didn’t really occur to me that anyone would care if individual people chose to get the covid shot or chose not to, especially those who had already had the virus, those with zero comorbidities, and those who had obvious other ways of treating infection and healing.
The idea that was propounded, that everyone would need to get the shot in order for anyone to be protected from the virus - a virus that many of us had already had - makes no sense if you believe the shot actually works, get it?
You take medicine for yourself. For better or worse, there isn’t a way to take medicine for someone else.
I remember sitting on the couch with Cait, processing elderberries from our bushes, while all this was happening, wondering out loud, do people actually, seriously think that we ought to get this shot? That’s so weird. When you were super sick, normal medicine world had nothing for you. These plants saved you. Why would we benefit from this now?
When things really heated up
When government employees and professional athletes and others were forced to get the shot to keep their jobs (and their pensions!) I remember walking around my neighborhood, so sad and scared, wondering how far is this going to go?
It’s fine if people want to get a shot or take a pill or whatever they want to do, it’s none of my business, but surely all the good people who got the shot, don’t actually think THIS is okay?
But people seemed hypnotized. And people who weren’t hypnotized were censored. And anyone who protested and said, this is a human rights and body autonomy issue, was scoffed at and derided absolutely mercilessly.
Anxious Attachment
What I am seeing now is that for me, that whole thing of painting as the villain any person who chose not to get the shot, activated my attachment system and I felt like the tribe was leaving me to die alone in the woods in winter.
This was not actually true. I was basically fine the whole time. I was housed, employed, loved, and healthy - perfectly fine, in short. But that terror of abandonment was the feeling all this evoked. It took me until recently to figure this out: Why I felt so, so bad, and so scared, when I knew some other ~ Unvaccinateds ~ who didn’t feel this way at all and just kept up on all the scientific research, following Dr. Moran, Dr. Campbell, and others, perhaps sad or frustrated or lonely at times, but not feeling emotionally activated like me. They were, all these people, securely attached.
I tried so hard to protect myself emotionally. I withdrew into myself like I did as a child, kept my face impassive and bided my time, knowing change is the only constant. (This is also called a freeze response, I believe). I tried to avoid places and situations in which I could get kicked out, situations in which I would be treated as untouchable, but I couldn’t. These places and situations found me regardless, and each time it was very painful. (But none of those situations were actually dangerous.)
What felt bad wasn’t so much that my world was smaller or that there was a culture war going on, though those things did feel very bad, it was that people like me were seen as villains - as selfish, unclean, and unsafe to be around. There is something so frightening about seeing someone who is like you in some important way being scorned or treated badly. It feels very threatening.
I see you
I know a handful of other people who chose not to get the shot for their own reasons, whose family refused to see them for a year or more (and in some cases, are now acting like nothing happened), or who lost their job or had to move, over this, who have really struggled - much more than I have - and in some cases have also felt your attachment systems very activated. I see you.
There are a great many people in my life who got the covid shot and were never unkind and judgmental about it to anyone, as far as I can tell. It was never an issue. They never lost their minds. If that’s you and you are reading this, I think you probably know who you are. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I see you.
If you are someone who did not want to get the shot, but you had to do it to keep your job or were pressured into it by people in your life, and you’ve never felt good about the whole thing, I see you too.
If you are someone who proudly got the shot and were more than happy to scapegoat and scorn those who chose differently, you are a human being who was under a lot of stress and fell into black and white thinking and moral exclusion. You don’t have to stay there. You are not my enemy. I see your common humanity. I see you.
The Aftermath/healing my attachment wound
I have had plenty of people simply not like me over the course of my life, and friend breakups and whatnot. I was slut-shamed and asked to leave a party once when I was 19, which was awful, but I had never had anything like the covid experience. It gave me a big, gaping window into all the people’s lives who have been vilified throughout time and space, whether they ‘deserved’ it or not.
It showed me how shallow it is to love yourself when you are loved and praised. That isn’t really love. Can you love yourself and stand by yourself when you are being told you are a piece of shit? I couldn’t, not at first. I just felt awful. But I started to learn, bit by bit, and now that this particular situation is over for now, I can see it as the gift it always was.
I really mean it. Pain pierces through the veil of our comfortable delusions. Life breaks our heart, and that’s as it should be. I think it’s because all this, not in spite of it, that I was able to start to really heal my attachment trauma - because I absolutely had to. The alternative wasn’t acceptable.
I started doing To Be Magnetic because I liked the concept, once I heard it explained - that you can create the external life circumstances you actually want by addressing and attending to your deep hurts, which generally fall into the categories of inner child and shadow. And that once you do, you can operate from a more integrated and powerful place, as opposed to what most of us do, which is that our wounding is usually running the show. They frame it in terms of ‘manifestion’ but it is really about emotional healing. I thought this made a lot of sense. So, I started doing it in October of 2022.
I did have all the ‘mini manifestations’ I had written on my list, come to me within the first three months, but the biggest change I noticed was within the same time frame I found I was much more secure in myself. I noticed it first with Cait, in our relationship. Then I started to realize that regarding these other, wider issues, I just didn’t feel so much like shit. I didn’t feel so scared. I started to feel a sense of neutrality emerge when before I had felt terror, shame, blame, and just anger or sadness. That feeling of being left in the woods alone to die, being abandoned by the tribe, was largely gone. Not that it can’t come up again. It actually can. But it takes more, and when it shows up, I have more tools to bring to bear. It started to be hard to care that much what other people think of me, when I really am good with myself.
The second time Cait and I got Covid
I had always assumed we would get covid again. I have had the flu twice in my life (as far as I know) and I get a cold nearly every year, so it stood to reason I would get covid again too. And we did, two years and five months after the first time, August of 2022. It was an interesting experience.
This time, it felt like my body knew exactly what to do, and I spiked a high fever within a few hours. I was very thirsty, so I drank a half gallon(!) of this wonderful herbal tea, and a gallon of (filtered, structured) water, and by midday the next day, I felt tired but no longer sick. My fever slowly went down that day until it was normal, and I felt normal too except a bit sniffly.
Cait on the other hand, who had been so sick before, didn’t get sick this time. She tested positive on a home test and had the frustrating experience of losing her sense of taste and smell for what felt to her to be an eternity - but was about two weeks. Otherwise, she had no symptoms. We stayed home and read books and were very bored until we were testing negative again and then we went back to work.
None of this is meant to be complete, to cover every relevant topic. It’s just my story and my thoughts. May it go into the cauldron of all-that-is and contribute to collective healing.
Thanks for being here. Particularly if you made it this far. I hope you can start to find security in yourself too, if you haven’t already, and feel that you are loved and you are love ~ all the time ~ no matter who you are.
Mollie
While you’re here
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*You can find that Abbie Hoffman quote here
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