The joy of birdsong

I’ve been thinking about presence a lot lately. I mean, how could I not, perched in a hanging chair on my family’s patio, managing my energy for the day? It’s this societal trope, reiterated almost ad nauseam, that we are supposed to live in the moment. And as with all things that are being said too much in passing, we hardly ever stop to wonder what the heck that actually means.

The photograph you see above was taken in early 2012, by me. It was a lucky shot and to my knowledge, I had never before taken a picture of a bird while it was singing. In fact, I hadn’t taken many pictures of birds to begin with, except of a few napping seagulls on our family trip to the Northern Sea once. Up until later in life, I wasn’t very interested in nature. I mean, I was interested in nature because I loved beautiful landscapes and something drew me to secluded, cave-like, serene, mysterious spots outdoors sometimes. But dandelion was about the only plant I could identify on a meadow and in terms of birds, it was crows, blackbirds, pigeons and, yeah, seagulls. (I’d like to point out that there are approximately fifty different species of seagulls. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t either until, like, two minutes ago.)

The picture above shows a robin and as I know now, they are one of the easier shots when you try to get a bird on film while singing. What strikes me about this image today are two things. Number one, it was taken in Kew Gardens, London, a place I’d really like to see again. (I didn’t live far from there in 2013.) Number two, I remember the scene as I took the photo - in a green house with my family, as we wandered around - but I don’t remember the bird song at all. Knowing a thing or two about the brain, I’m assuming that I can’t remember something that I couldn’t categorize back then. Bird song is bird song, right?

Well. Welcome to 2025, the year where I finally realized that not only are there fifty species of seagulls in the world, there are also at least fifty different species of birds around you all the time if you know what to look for - acoustically or visually. If you commute between a place you live and a place you work at and you talk occasional walks through a park or a forest, you will, like me, end up encountering dozens and dozens of different birds. I know because I have proof in my app (I use Merlin Bird ID, it’s free), which conveniently shows me which bird is singing at the moment, as long as there’s not too much noise.

To be fair, my birding journey already started a year ago when I downloaded the app. With my mother being a hobby ornothologist, I guess it was ultimately a matter of time and I’ve now been known to stop in my tracks and listen intently or stare into the foliage of nearby trees to figure out who’s singing or complaining and why. My life list of all birds I have encountered so far include pearls like the chiffchaff, the short-toed treecreeper and the cutest bird of all time, the long-tailed tit. I swear I’m not making this up.

As of today, I’m fairly confident in pointing out about ten to twenty different species by either look or song (don’t test me on the calls though) and I burst into childish delight when some of them come to the feeder in front of my family’s kitchen window. Not only is it adorable to watch sparrows and great tits (chrm) peck at grains and make a mess, I also feel closer to all of this because I now know them by name and recognize at least a little bit of their behavior.

So when my mum and I were in the car today, a little disappointed still that we couldn’t make out what that one bird had been we had just heard, I pointed out that it’s really odd how little most people, including my past self, know about birds because they are everywhere. And not just visually, like insects or ‘weeds’, as we snarkily call all the plants we don’t want or understand, but acoustically. Bird songs, especially in spring and summer, are actually pretty hard to miss, but because we can’t tell them apart, they become background noise. Beautiful background noise for the most part (although a broken-record pigeon or an upset magpie are … a little hard on the ears), but background noise nonetheless.

And this is where I return to my initial statement about being in the moment, because our thinking brain, commonly referred to as the consciousness, does exactly this. It turns everything into background noise as long as we’re able to run on auto-pilot (which is actually most of the time, luckily, life would be too exhausting otherwise), only to focus instead on rumination, speculation and planning. In short, we are dissociated from the present moment to a certain extent for a large portion of our lives. Ever driven your car someplace familiar and thought about something else while driving? Trailed off during a conversation with a friend? That’s everyday-life dissociation. It’s also one of the reasons why we believe that the years go by faster and faster as we age - the more routine or familiar experiences we have, the more we can run on auto-pilot and the less aware we are of time passing (amongst other factors obviously).

As common as dissociation is (not just in trauma, which would be a different post) and as useful as it can be to manage energy/engagement and to collect our thoughts from time to time, we have also collectively come to realize that when we spend too much time ‘in our heads’ instead of ‘in the moment’, we tend to be more anxious about the future or resentful about the past and we simply don’t experience life as intensely as we could. In other words, we tend to feel the most alive when we are fully present in the situation that we’re in. And how do we do that? By turning background noise into meaningful language.

Having a very active thinking brain, I’ve been on a mindfulness journey for a few years. I’ve tried different forms of meditation (not all of them are designed to ground you in your surroundings, some actually do the opposite) and, through cooking, time spent outdoors and little sensory experiments, slowly started to immerse myself more. A shower on the coldest setting does wonders to quiet the mind, as does the scent of fresh herbs while chopping.

When birding came around, it took things to a whole new level, though. Because, again, birds are actually everywhere. So any time I was outside or close to a window, I could listen and observe. And before I knew it, my senses would reliably alert me to songs both familiar and new whenever I went out. It’s like when you recognize different types of vehicles by their sounds - but about one thousand percent more wholesome. Unlike car sounds, the birds will tell you where the cats are (magpies are very vocal about that), whether there’s rain coming or that the sun is setting. They will sit on roof tops or in bushes or fly high above your head. Their presence will tell you about vegetation, season or pollution. It’s like your awareness of your surroundings is expanding all of a sudden - where before there was chaotic and seemingly boring input, now there is meaning and definition. I’m more aware of where I am because I can read my surroundings better.

And the beautiful thing about this is that it doesn’t require any additional thinking. You don’t even have to know if it’s actually a blackcap you’re hearing or a garden warbler. Being in the moment, I find, is not just about being aware of your sensory input rather than your circling thoughts. It’s also very much the ability to simply enjoy what’s around you. And no matter where you are in life or what you’re dealing with, there is an inexplicable joy in opening your window on a late June day around sunset and hearing a blackbird sing somewhere in the distance. I’m actually hearing one right now as I’m writing this. We are so used to run around in our internal factory of thoughts big and small that we forget this simple truth - there is nothing, and I mean, nothing except the here and now. There is absolutely no harm in putting our thoughts aside for a while and just listen.

May this beautiful bird song remind us of that every day.

My recovery from ME/CFS - part one: and … go!

Hello again, everyone, and sorry for the delay. I was in a bit of a relapse situation, as is very common during recovery, but the brain fog is lifting so here we go.

In my last post I referred to some factors of my illness as cues. Why? As you know, I also work in opera, ballet and theater (and a little television back in the day). In the backstage world, cues are little timestamps in the play or show that indicate that something is supposed to happen or change, like a kabuki curtain falling (an effect I love) or someone entering the scene. These cues are timed by either music or other reference points in the procedure and are overseen by, in our case, one or several stage managers. When the time has come, they will shout or whisper (depending on the current music volume) ‘Stand by for cue 38. And … go!’, which will then set stage technicians or singers or dancers into motion. Each cue also has a consecutive number so there are no mix ups (theoretically).

So basically, you see the singer step forward on stage, swinging his glittery pole around, and you’re like, huh, that’s the cue for our aerealist to be lowered onto the scene. Except that it doesn’t happen because the machine broke and the aerealist is basically stuck in between fly bars thirty feet in the air for twenty minutes, but that’s a story for another day.

Why am I telling you this? (Apart from the fact that stage life is cool and I can’t stop gushing about it.) Because well before I actually started working on my recovery, time and again a little innocuous cue prompted me to look at my illness and understand. At the time, I just didn’t take them seriously yet, postponed my reaction or overlooked them entirely. Which is, like, human consciousness 101.

Before we get into the cues and what they were telling me, here’s where I was at when they finally hit me. In my last post, I detailed my condition at my worst. At that point, I cried pretty much every single day and sometimes counted the hours until it was time for bed because sleep would make everything go away for a while. It was all just extremely unclear. It was unclear if any doctor would ever find something structurally wrong with me. It was unclear if I actually had ME/CFS because everyone was reluctant to give me the official diagnosis, despite everything else being ruled out. It was unclear how my life was going to continue and how far I was going to deteriorate. It was unclear how I would manage the situation financially in the long run, as a freelancer. And it was unclear how I was supposed to live with that amount of pain, unresponsive to meds (except for the side effects, yay), for an indefinite amount of time. Rough.

To give you a quick idea of the medical help I was receiving: I reached out to the pain specialist who had treated me for endometriosis a few years prior. They wanted me to fill out a fourteen page questionnaire which, in my state, took several days and worsened my symptoms. When the secretary got back to me, she said the doctor had looked at my file (I had also attached an overview of what’s been done so far and what I needed) and said ‘We can’t treat you.’ That was it. No further explanation. That was pretty much the standard experience.

In early March, my neurologist appointment was finally up (which my mum had gotten for me by being on hold for thirty minutes, brave her). The drive was a full hour and we waited for twenty minutes, me in my sunglasses and leaning onto anything I could find because it was exhausting to sit for so long. I got an EEG done and was finally told in a five minute monologue that he couldn’t find anything and was sending me over to an MRI. No, he was not going to diagnose me, and something in his demeanor (which got confirmed in a follow-up appointment much later) told me that he wasn’t really expecting anything to be wrong with me.

There were often weeks or months between these appointments (or lack thereof) and when I came home that day, head exploding and going into hibernation for the following four days, I think I was just angry. The general lack of care and respect for patients who are clearly suffering tremendously made me stubborn enough to be like: If you won’t help me, I’m going to do this on my own.

And so, when I lay there, humming to myself to alleviate my headache, I went on my phone and, in small one to five minute increments I typed ‘How I recovered from CFS’ into the YouTube search bar. As with anything in life, there were probably people who had done it before me. With my eyes closed because it hurt too much, I listened to Raelan Agle detailing her own recovery from ME/CFS a few years ago. And while she was talking, I started picking up on those cues from prior months. Here’s what they were.

• My symptoms (fatigue, heaviness, brain fog, headaches, throat pain, pressure on chest) hadn’t been consistent over time. Some of them had even vanished altogether while new symptoms had popped up out of nowhere.

• There was, so far, no major structural reason to be found for why my health was deteriorating so much. And even if a mitochondria test (which I had wanted to get for a long time) would reveal malfunctions or my upcoming MRI would show neuroinflammation, no one could fix that with medication or procedures.

• My symptoms had started after a very stressful phase of my life had come to an end.

• I was in trauma therapy before so I knew that my body was still dealing with childhood and youth stuff.

• The same triggers (cognitive tasks, physical exertion etc.) didn’t always cause the same intensity of symptoms.

• When emotionally overwhelmed or fearful of the future, my symptoms got much worse.

• I had known my body to show inexplicable symptoms (IBS, back pain, rashes etc.) all my life.

I later learned that those are the exact criteria Alan Gordon uses to identify neuroplastic pain as opposed to structural pain. I was checking all the boxes. For what? Well, for experiencing not a physical illness but a mind-body (aka psychosomatic) condition. Oof.

But even as the realization dawned on me, I remained skeptical. First of all, I still fully expected to hear a bunch of woo woo about supplements and positive thinking at some point in the video (didn’t happen, thanks Raelan). And second, there was a lot of internal resistance to this idea, especially in my case.

In 2022, after fifteen years of suffering through intense monthly pain for which I was eventually being prescribed opioids (that I never took because I was scared), I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis and received surgery. The tissue where no tissue belonged as well as my uterus were being removed and I have since been relieved of my pain almost entirely (sometimes there’s a little bit but it’s gotten rare). The reason it had taken fifteen years to get the procedure was that despite the late confirmation that it was, in fact, a structural illness, almost no doctor had believed me. So trust me when I say that leaning into the ‘it’s just stress’ narrative (which is not what psychosomatic illness is about, as I later learned) wasn’t something I was prepared for.

Furthermore, it is really, and I mean really, hard to believe that something like my severe ‘brain burn’, as I called it, PEM or a chronically inflamed throat can be psychosomatic. I have since seen people recover from even crazier symptoms with a mind-body approach but initially, you’re like: no. way. Especially since the official medical model of ME/CFS is that it’s multi-systemic, neuro-immunological, severe, incurable. If you hear this often enough, you believe it, and the intensity of your symptoms makes it very easy.

With psychosomatic or mind-body conditions, there are a lot of misconceptions that even doctors have stuck in their head and that make it very hard to accept you actually have one:

• For some reason, stress-related illnesses seem to get less attention because doctors are only there to treat ‘the real stuff’. Stupid.

• Psychosomatic illness is not equivalent to ‘you have stress in your life’. There are more complex explanations for why your body is exhibiting symptoms without structural cause.

• Findings in labs and MRIs that are abnormal are immediately seen as proof that the pain comes from there, despite numerous studies that show little correlation between structural findings and pain, for instance with back pain.

• We associate psychosomatic illness with being ‘emotionally weak’ so having an ‘actual’ disease with a name and a bio-chemical explanation makes us feel a little better.

• Some people have the misguided idea that you are somehow responsible for this condition happening to you if it’s mind-body. Nah. I didn’t choose my trauma either.

• Speaking of trauma, many people believe that their childhood or adult life experiences don’t ‘qualify’ for a good reason for mind-body issues. Like, ‘oh, but it wasn’t that bad.’ Well. You might be surprised.

• And - saving the best for last - psychosomatic illness does not mean it’s in your head, as in, you make up the pain, you can snap out of it or you’re exaggerating. It is in your head, as every pain is happening in your head (brain), but in the acute phase of it happening, you have about as much control over it as you have over a heart attack (which is also, as we know, a result of stress).

All that is to say, when I listened to Raelan’s story, I was unsure but curious - she fully recovered many years ago, after all. I still struggled with some of the ideas in the list above, and understandably so, but with the medical model of my condition I had adapted before, there was no hope. Partial improvement maybe, but I would never fully recover. Seeing this as mind-body would change everything, but I was also aware of the potential false hope. Nevertheless, I kept digging, and over the next few days I found that there are actually a lot of people out there who have fully recovered, many of them sick for much longer than me and much more severely, including quite a few who did have abnormal lab results or structural findings. And on average, their level of critical awareness was similar to mine. So maybe I was actually on to something.

Now, before we get all worked up, I’m not going to deny anyone’s experience of ME/CFS as a strucural illness. Obviously. My own experience had been denied many times before. I’m stating what I’ve found (and have seen backed up by science since then) to indicate that for the first time, I had reason to believe that I could actually get out of all this.

I’m not known for being a believer. I play the devil’s advocate in discussions out of habit - because I want all sides to be seen. I seldom take a stance, and when I do, I have often changed it over the years when I realized that I had been wrong. When forced to ‘make up my mind’, my viewpoints will often shift from day to day based on the current evidence. So even with all these new insights in mind, in most moments on most days, it was hard to imagine that there was no structural reason for my condition. Why would my brain make me suffer so much? I couldn’t make my own breakfast, I couldn’t talk to my friends, I couldn’t go outside.

But luckily, I didn’t have to believe in anything to get started. And by the way, to this day I haven’t fully given up the idea that as a sort of catalyst to all of this, something maybe did happen to my body. While pre-Covid, many people correlated ME/CFS with EBV infections, nowadays there’s a lot more talk about lingering Covid viruses and spike proteins from the vaccine. I had had reactions to all three and it seems ignorant to rule out the possibility that they are involved in it all, but what changed everything for me was to allow for the possibility that there was a different explanation underneath all this. And I will talk more about what that entailed and how I got on track with my recovery in my next post of this series. I know this was a long one and I still feel like I couldn’t do it all justice but it’s a start. See ya, folks.

My recovery from ME/CFS - prologue

My journey with ME/CFS started out like most people’s journey with most illnesses. I was getting symptoms and I thought something was wrong. Well, something was indeed very wrong, but not in the way I thought.

This will be a multi part series. Many people on YouTube and beyond have asked me to detail my journey with and through this illness, and I think it’s in fact worth sharing because so much of it applies to so many of us, certainly well beyond the boundaries of individual medical conditions. Ready to hear how it all began? Let’s do this.

In spring of 2024, I was busy building a new life. I had separated from my husband in late 2023 and had since moved out of my tiny house and into a studio flat in a bigger town in an attempt to kindle a new social life. I loved my new place (I still do) and despite some common difficulties that arise when you’re an introvert and all your hobbies are solitary, I managed to slowly build something for myself. I had my job at the opera, my sister had recently gotten married and I had even met someone with whom I thought it was going to work out. Until it really, really didn’t.

In the aftermath of all that and while still figuring out the ins and outs of my new town life, I started getting throat pain, which initially didn’t do much except keep me from enjoying my choir rehearsals as much as I otherwise did. Then it prevented me from going to the rehearsals. I was haphazardly diagnosing myself with tonsillitis if anyone was asking but other than that I didn’t do much about it. I had known my body to produce weird symptoms all my life (cue 1).

A few weeks later I started to feel fatigued as well. It was a stressful time and I also got chest pain so I took the hint and stayed clear of dating and anything that seemed even remotely draining. I went to the Black Forest for a ten day hiking and biking trip (well documented on my channel, cough) and I thought, maybe this was just a passing thing.

When I came back in mid August, I had taken on a little job in the place I had been staying in - taking over their Instagram channel. We had scheduled a weekend of photo and video shoots a couple of weeks later and I had a blast, until I felt like I was getting really, really sick on the last day. My head was exploding and when I was home I developed a fever and more fatigue. All the way through September I felt generally sick, my lymph nodes were often swollen, my throat aching and my head throbbing. And anything I did that was remotely exhausting got me crashing on the couch.

At that point, I had dropped my previous half-serious self-diagnoses and suspected that maybe it was ME/CFS. I went to my GP, who has known me half my life, and she agreed, referring me to specialists who eventually declined to see me (full waitlist). I did think that my emotional stress in the year leading up to that point had a lot to do with it (cue 2), but the symptoms were so persistent and seemed to follow activities that I actually enjoyed, so I had a hard time believing that this was psychosomatic.

The way I understood it back then, ME/CFS or myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome is a medical condition where your body loses its ability to recover. From, like, anything. There’s different theories behind it, antibodies, mitochondria, inflammation, the whole shebang. Most people have chronic pain with it that gets worse after any form of activity (depending on your severity, ‘activity’ can include stuff like eating), as well as severe fatigue that won’t get better after resting. Physical activity outside your baseline can result in either PEM (post-exertional malaise; a delayed response of sickness, in my case the day or the second day after) or a crash, which is PEM, but in a more permanent form. Some people can still go to work, others are bedbound and unable to speak (e.g. Dianna Cowern, also known as Physics Girl, in her most severe years). In other words, it doesn’t just sound like living hell, I can confirm first hand that it actually is living hell. There is no official treatment, let alone cure for it. When Long Covid came around, which is very similar, it got a little more attention and some say there will be medication in a few years, but for reasons which will become obvious later on, I remain skeptical about that.

Late September I was supposed to be back at work at the opera house, working in props for three weeks during a ballet guest performance. The evening before my first work day, I had absolutely no clue how I was going to be able to do it. I had been mostly couchbound for a few days and I was looking at well over seven days of ten to twelve hour shifts in a row. You know, one of those jobs where you easily get your 15.000 steps a day.

I got up the next day and told myself: ‘If I have ME/CFS and if going to work will result in a terrible crash from which I won’t recover, then at least I made it worth my while.’ Needless to say, I love my job. So I went. While we were assembling about twenty ballet bars made from what looked like old metal heat pipes, I felt dizzy and thought: ‘This was a bad idea.’ But then, miraculously, it got better and I was able to fully participate in the production for the whole of three weeks (cue 3).

After which I crashed and was unable to do my own grocery shopping, attend activities or gatherings or even go on a walk. All that confirmed the diagnosis further and was scary as f. I went to a couple of more doctors to rule out other forms of illness with similar symptoms. Everything came back negative. Early December I was back at the opera for another production and again, I was able to work for about a week, only that this time, I didn’t crash after and was able to spend Christmas time and the following days with my family, see friends and do everything pretty much like I normally would, except that I was sometimes a little tired. I thought, okay, maybe this was it now. I made plans for 2025, one of them being to take time to recover from everything that had happened and that was still to come (my divorce was up in a few weeks).

I remember the exact moment when my symptoms came back. It was December 31st and I was about to hit the streets with my neighbor - we had planned to have a fancy dinner and then each celebrate New Year’s Eve our own ways. Before we headed out, I got a phone call from my former host and now boss that I was doing Instagram for. We discussed the plans for next year and after we hung up, my body just said no. I once again got flu-like symptoms which I was able to ignore long enough to still go out to that dinner (it was awesome) and watch the finale of LOST season 1 again during the fireworks (that was awesome too). From then on, it was a slow and steady decline.

Initially, I followed what I believed was a valid pacing strategy - meaning, I rested for the most part on most days and then used the ‘saved’ energy on going out once a week to do grocery shopping or take a walk. That’s not a sustainable way to use very limited energy, as I now know, and it led to stronger and stronger PEM after each activity, resulting in me being mostly housebound pretty quickly. My headaches were very bad and didn’t respond to any pain killer. The fatigue had already prevented me from reading books the previous fall, now I started having trouble sitting at the computer for longer stretches. Initially, only being able to focus on work for short periods, I could spend the rest of my days gaming and watching my favorite shows. Over time, this became more and more difficult.

I had dropped out of my choir completely, repeatedly canceled meet ups with friends because I wasn’t functioning and started preparing my meals while seated. Yet, I was trying to hold on to what was left - mainly my job as senior props manager for a large opera production. Somehow I managed to do all the research and e-mail correspondence from home in small increments, resting whenever the headaches got so bad that I couldn’t continue. Again, I love my job and the responsibility didn’t scare me, but it’s pretty obvious that researching, ordering and managing more than two hundred individual items while being severely incapacitated wasn’t exactly ideal.

In early February and leading up to the divorce date, I knew I needed more help. I had been living in this beautiful, isolated flat for months now, unable to really participate in life, and I was starting to decline to the point that I couldn’t manage my own household. My mom, who had been grocery shopping for me for a while already, eventually took me home with her and I’ve been staying at my parents’ ever since.

I already talked about the lowest points in some of my other entries - I was practically bedbound, only that I was more comfortable in a recliner chair, so that’s where I stayed. I was in a lot of pain so I mostly focused on my breath and hung on to the idea that eventually, I would see a specialist and would maybe start some experimental treatment that I would have to pay for myself to see at least a little bit of an improvement. I could get up to eat with my parents or use the bathroom, and that was pretty much it for a few weeks. If I did more (and trust me, I tried), I got worse the next day.

Basically, everything I had dreaded early on about the condition was becoming my new reality - and I knew full well that in terms of symptoms, I wasn’t even at the end of the spiral. I didn’t have nerve pain and my sleep was, albeit not restorative, always relieving me of my symptoms for a few hours. Apart from being very pale because I hadn’t left the house in a few months, I probably looked okay. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was 33 years old and I was using the text-to-speech function on my iPhone because reading messages from friends caused me physical pain. I was using sunglasses indoors because daylight was sometimes too bright for my eyes. And I saw my heart rate increase and my HRV decrease basically every morning. My functional capacity (FUNCAP) was at 2.9 out of 6 (healthy).

In other words, my reality in February and March was grim, and I had no prospect of any improvement. And yet, I eventually did, and I’ll cover some of the turning points in the next post. So stay tuned, or whatever they say. I’ll see you around.

Limbo

Just to get that out of the way, no, I’m not talking about that kind of limbo. You know, back-breaking dance moves under a horizontal, lowered pole. The kind of stuff that accounts for about 76,8 % of spilled beer at parties.

I’m talking about limbo as in, a state of transition where everything seems a little surreal and out of place and weirdly slowed down. Not that I have any indication of what that’s actually like, but I always picture myself being on a Zero G flight I’ll never be able to afford, and the plane has just reached the upper end of the parable, putting everyone on board in the desired state of zero gravity where your hair starts sticking out and you can do somersaults in the air (unless you have to puke, which is fairly common). For a very short period of time, given the amount of money you pay for the experience, you are seemingly weightless and everything you know, including the most fundamental rule of physics we are usually subjected to, is coming to a halt. I imagine that time and space lose a little bit of their usual meaning in these moments.

So now that we have assessed how much I want to be floating in the air for 10,000 bucks (or not, I’d surely be one of the pukers), let’s return to real life where limbo states are actually pretty common - and free, yay! It’s just - we don’t usually enjoy them very much.

Let me give you an example many of you might be familiar with, depending on how you found this blog. In 2017, I had the somewhat bold idea to build my own tiny house and live in it full time. Part of that plan was to find a property to rent where I could put the house. When the house was done (or at least done enough) in 2018, I had yet to find a place to park it though. It wasn’t lack of grit or initiative on my side, it was simply hard. I’ll spare you the legal details and administrative challenges but for well over two years, I had a house on a trailer sitting in my parents’ driveway and I couldn’t put it anywhere, until we finally managed to obtain a building permit for my parents’ garden where it resides to this day.

In my experience, limbo states happen when a situation had a certain drive behind it, like personal action or a dynamic that’s outside of your control, just like the plane burning up a ridiculous amount of fuel to shoot vertically into the air. And then, all of a sudden, you take the drive or the dominating factor away. The plane just floats. And for at least a brief moment, you’re like ‘Oh-oh’.

I continued building my house well into 2019 but the uncertainty concerning my parking spot and living in an unfinished building with no water connection for an additional two years has since become my definition of limbo. You want things to go somewhere, but for reasons sometimes outside of your control, they just won’t. And because you can’t simply walk away from many things, whether it’s a house you built or a flight you’re on, you are stuck. You will feel uncertain about the future, maybe anxious. You feel thrown. And you will certainly question your life choices (like building a tiny house for 35,000 bucks instead of spending the money on three Zero G flights).

A lot of people would probably cite Covid times as one of their most intense limbo experiences, where some of us couldn’t even work their jobs, with no timeline when we were ever allowed to return to it. It can be intense.

Knowing a little bit about psychology (fourth-semester here), I had a gut feeling that limbo states were back on the menu for me as I slowly worked my way towards recovery from ME/CFS. As with any severe illness, particularly if it’s chronic, you eventually get to a place where in order to cope with pain and loss of function, you have to let go of any expectation on yourself, whether it’s coming from you or from someone else. You can’t live up to anything if you’re mostly stuck in a recliner chair with a sleeping mask on. Little by little, as my condition was progressing, I dropped out of regular activities, jobs and meetings with friends, until about the only expectation I had was to deal with my level of functionality in the most positive way possible. In the worst weeks, I could eat sitting upright and go to the bathroom and talk a few words with my parents, and that took up all my energy.

I’ll talk about my approach to recovery in a different post, but basically, when things slowly started to get better, I knew that I would eventually land in limbo land for a while. My most severe sick days are over. My initial belief that my illness was at least partially a strictly structural or physical disease that I didn’t have control over has been challenged. I am hopeful that I can make a full recovery with the tools I now have.

But, and this is a common experience in many different forms of recovery, this shift also comes with a feeling of displacement. I am not consumed by being sick anymore, but I am far from being well. I sometimes have enough energy to participate in parts of life again - and that builds expectations, externally and internally, that I can’t yet fulfill (and maybe never want to fulfill again?). I have no timeline for my recovery, so I can’t make any plans. I take it day by day, still reeling from my experiences just a while ago. In short, I’m still hit by the past but can’t move on to the future yet. The present feels shaky, timeless. Building trust in my body is a crucial part of my recovery but even so, you can’t help but fear relapses sometimes.

I don’t know what my life will look like when I have recovered, and I can only really start building it for good when I am recovered, so where does that put me right now?

In a place of tremendous fear, to be honest. And I know why. Imagine going through an intense phase where all your focus and energy is needed just to make it through. Like climbing a ladder on the outside of a very tall industrial building. One foot after the other, you have a certain rhythm that keeps you going. And then, suddenly, you’re on top - and you bet that the first thing you do is to look down and get scared af about what you just did. That’s okay. If you expect it to happen, it’s actually much less terrifying. I feel like one of the most important things is to acknowledge that limbo states are almost inevitable at certain stages of life and that they are not a sign that things fall apart even more - even if it feels like it.

Feeling uncertain, overwhelmed or out of place when in transition doesn’t mean you have to follow every fatalistic doomsday prediction your brain will come up with, though. It’s scary to see things change just as it’s scary to be stuck but your plane is not going to crash and you’re not going to fall from the building. It’s normal for fear to come up when it finally has a chance - when so far you were too busy to survive to even go there.

I learned from my experience with my house. Waiting, as I did back then, is not the answer because it creates tension and puts you in a passive state. One thing I definitely don’t need is more freeze responses in my nervous system. Instead, I deal with the fear through somatic tracking and other methods. Trust me, ignoring the fear as you stare down thirty feet of empty wall space is not going to make you less afraid of heights, and insulting yourself for being afraid in the first place doesn’t do the trick either. Gradual exposure can help, though, and knowing that whatever the phase, it’s not permanent.

I’ve also come to appreciate the limbo state simply for the chance to take a breath. After an intense and steep ascend, the plane is now sitting weightlessly in the air for a few moments (or you’re panting from all the ladder-climbing), and although you don’t really know what the second half of the parable will feel like (or whatever the heck you’re doing on top of an industrial building), you kinda have a feeling that it will be a hell of a ride. So why not take a moment to honor your experiences, maybe sort your shit out, face your fear, do a few dance moves - under a pole, if you must - and shout ‘Here goes nothing!’ before you continue on your journey.

Enjoy your flight, everyone. You paid a lot to be here.

The pattern-seeking machine

Let me take you back a few years. Quite a few years, to be precise. In 2007, I was in 9th grade and I wasn’t exactly what you’d call popular. Neither did I have any intention of being ‘popular’ - but I certainly wasn’t calling for the estrangement and bewildered looks I got either.

So we were enjoying German class. That is, I was. Most others in the room were more or less waiting for it to be over. Our teacher presented us with a poem. No further comment, she just read it out loud, let it linger in the air and asked, ‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear this?’

My hand shot up, as always. And as always, she waited a few moments to see if anyone else was participating (a futile attempt that year, most of the time). Finally, she nodded at me. ‘So what was the first thing you noticed?’ And I said, without hesitation: ‘The meter is regular.’

Silence. And then, roaring laughter, somewhere between incredibility and dismissal. Even my teacher laughed - but in her defense, she smiled at me and I knew it came from a place of respect. ‘That’s the first thing you notice?’, someone asked from the back.

Yup. Can’t help myself.

My brain has been a pattern-seeking machine ever since I can remember. In an attempt to categorize an overwhelming world, especially for a neurodivergent child, I used my IQ to find matches and correlations and other logical connections between things all day long. I knew on which step of the staircase my dad usually coughed when going downstairs. I could tell by the sounds of passing trains outside whether it was 1.08 pm or 1.21 pm (there are two at 1.21 pm and from different directions). And by the age of 15, I was first hired to proofread academic texts before publication because I was able to reliably detect double blanks in printed paperwork.

I love when things make sense. And since surprises are kind of an ambivalent thing for me, I also love being able to predict what’s happening. Especially in the realm of great unpredictability - human interaction.

Well, actually, human interaction isn’t that unpredictable, not even in extreme forms like violence (read Gavin de Becker). But it was hard for me to figure it out when I was young and unspoken social rules didn’t come intuitively to me. I remember the looks I got when I was playing cards with a few kids on a vacation and I helped myself to a second biscuit - as it turned out, it had been the last one and no one else had had more than one. I was vaguely aware of that but I hadn’t understood until that moment that this meant I wasn’t supposed to just take the final one. My parents had certainly raised me to be compassionate and forthcoming and I was definitely picking up on that but alas, the world continued to be confusing. All these expectations.

Finding patterns in people’s behavior, in license plates and price tags (I recently figured out which specific number on these printed labels from the butcher’s counter indicate how many customers the store has had that day) will be a live-long endeavor and helps a great deal when you’re very sick and unable to entertain any other distraction. It makes the world more manageable and turns everything into a real-life scientific study.

But as we all know, every study has its flaws. The patterns we see might just be the patterns we always saw, the patterns we want to see - or no patterns at all. And the confidence of your predictions, whether it’s about the number of cars you’re going to encounter on a familiar stretch of road, the response of a loved one to something you say or the amount of pain you will be in two hours from now - this confidence is heavily influenced by the accuracy of your past predictions, especially the high-stakes ones.

As of late, with the divorce and several other personal relationships falling apart, I realize I lost quite a bit of my confidence in my ability to categorize human behavior and to deduct accurate predictions from it. If asked again, I might even question whether that poem’s meter is actually one hundred percent regular. (I’m sure it was.)

There are many more tools I rely on these days to make sense of the world and navigate my own journey, not just pattern-seeking, but it’s still very important for me and I’m sharing this because beneath the obvious impact, drastic life changes and chronic illness also often influence our general ability to make sense of the world, which has vast consequences. Somehow, instinctively, we assume that we must have been fundamentally wrong about many things if we ended up in this painful place.

Well, at least that much can be said with confidence, deducted from patterns I’ve observed for a long time: Everyone can (and most will) end up in a very painful place at least once in their lives. And everyone’s predictions are flawed to an extent. While we don’t have to adopt the idea that we brought all this misery onto ourselves (a rather problematic thing to say, depending on the circumstances), we can still take the opportunity to overhaul our machines, you know, some oil, some tightening of screws, that kind of stuff. It doesn’t hurt to ask, ‘Maybe not all of the patterns I detected were accurate, were they?’

But just because our lives seem to fall apart all of a sudden, that doesn’t mean that every prediction, every network of logical connections we formed in our head (I often picture mine as neural networks or trees) was incorrect. I’m reminding myself that I haven’t been hit by any of the cars whose speed I calculated before crossing the street. I somehow made it through adulthood so far without breaking any major laws (I hope) or starting fist fights with people (I hate fist fights), despite the fact that I sometimes seem to read people ‘wrong’.

My pattern-seeking machine might be off sometimes, but not that far off. It might have led me into treacherous social waters sometimes, but it also guided me in making art, form long-lasting friendships and take care of myself when I realized I really needed to. I think it’s just time for an upgrade and I’m working on that now. And with time, I might be able to regain the confidence I had when I was 15 and all that mattered was a regular meter in a poem from a few hundred years ago.

Tabula Rasa

Here I am. 33 years old, recently divorced and severely sick back home with my parents. Within the last few months I‘ve lost the ability to do my work, both on YouTube and in props, to live by myself and run my own errands and ultimately, to socialise meaningfully with anyone.

This is not the entry where I explain about ME/CFS or what else led me here. The time for that will come. Right now, in this moment, I keep thinking of this term. Tabula rasa. I have a rather useless degree in classics so I can explain to you where it comes from - it describes a wax tablet often used by students in the old, old Roman days that, after being written on, is then wiped smooth to make space for the next exercise, thereby erasing what was before and starting with a blank slate.

Except that‘s not entirely true. As is the nature of a wax tablet, you‘re only redistributing matter. Everything is still there, it‘s just going to take a new shape in the next round.

And that‘s what I‘m trying to do. Not that long ago, I had a life; I had hobbies and (multiple) jobs and friends and a marriage and countless random experiences. Me getting sick has been the wiping process - all meaningful bumps in my inner landscape reduced to a flat line, to the point where earlier this year many days consisted mainly of lying down with my eyes closed and without any distractions, because that‘s the only thing I could stand.

And now, there is nothing. To redistribute and draw new lines and form new words, I need energy, and it‘s not coming back quickly. I‘m no longer in the business of wearing a sleep mask all day but I am also still housebound most of the time. These have been the toughest months of my life.

Since I can not currently share all of this on YouTube, as I normally would, and since these times command changes anyway, I‘m now, and with a pain-ridden grin in my face, returning to something I have loved forever and had to abandon a bit for a while for various reasons: writing.

I‘ll turn this new space here into my journal, detailing my recovery (I‘m optimistic) and probably many more things along the way. I can‘t do much right now, but this I can do and it brings me some of the much needed joy that keeps me going. May this, if nothing else, entertain you for a few minutes. I‘ll see you in the next one.