Circumstances Matter

Last week, I wrote about presidents, engineers, artists, and activists who worked themselves into illness. Each person I mentioned lived with fortunate circumstances. Eads and Roebling traveled to Europe for months for “rest cures” and continued building their bridges all the while. Roebling and Wilson became essentially incapacitated, but because they had intelligent and strong wives who took over their work, they did not get fired from their roles of a lifetime. Roosevelt not only took weeks or months off at a time to recuperate his health abroad and at home, he ended up purchasing outright his favorite resort.

But not everyone is as fortunately positioned. For example, Washington Roebling’s debilitating illness stemmed from caisson sickness developed while inspecting the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge’s piers. Many of his workers also developed caisson sickness and subsequently died or were permanently disabled causing severe financial burdens on themselves and their families.

The first time I burned out on a job, I developed debilitating symptoms but did not have the financial ability to leave the job until I found a new one. My sleep pattern was completely destroyed. Every second of the few hours I managed to sleep was filled with stress dreams, mostly about work. I lost a substantial amount of cognitive functioning, similar to Long COVID brain fog. My once remarkable memory was shot to pieces. And the effects of my sleep deprived fog made me fear that I would severely injure myself by tripping and falling down or accidentally crossing the street when it wasn’t safe.

I was scared enough that I actually attempted to ask for help.

I asked my boss if we could adjust my workload and get someone else from our department to help me on the massive multi-million dollar, multi-department project our portion of which rested solely on my shoulders. His response, “Let me teach you how to be a functioning insomniac.”

I wanted to ask my doctor to prescribe a rest cure, but figuring she would laugh in my face if I made such an archaic request, I used different words to ask for help. She shrugged and said, “Try melatonin.”

With this ineffectual advice in my pocket and no spare cash in my bank account, I continued to move through my life mentally and, occasionally physically, stumbling around like a zombie. It took over a year to find a new job to financially enable me to leave, and another year and a half plus extensive therapy to restore healthy sleep patterns and cognitive functioning.

I was unfortunately circumstanced during that time, forced to make choices that detracted from my overall physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.

Currently, I am precariously balanced on a cliff’s edge of being fortunately circumstanced. I developed a moderate case of Long COVID right after having established myself as fully self-employed. The work that I intended to do with my business now falls into one of four categories thanks to Long COVID. It’s either tiring, challenging, impossible, or high-risk. As a result, I am earning 75% of the income I anticipated for 2024, the first year my business has seen a profit. However, because I am sacrificing almost all the unpaid work (marketing, networking, prospecting, service development) to be able to complete my contracted work, I am doing between 33-50% of the work I intended for this year and am endangering future income.

The longer I have Long COVID, the more precarious my future income becomes. The stories I’ve heard from others suffering Long COVID about the difficulty of applying for and receiving social security disability makes me hope that I will not have to go that route. The determining factor will be which ends first: Long COVID or my open contracts.

While I’m thankful that currently my circumstances are fortunate, some days I wish I could drop everything and spend a few months on a rest cure somewhere like Roosevelt, Eads, Roebling, and countless others.

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Feature image credit: money bags by Ersin from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)