As I mentioned in the introduction, these subjects may be tender for you, because they could hit you in an area that is still healing. All of these events took place before the pandemic, but because each of these stories is about health, reading this will likely bring up emotions related to the pandemic.

If that’s true for you, that’s okay.

Go slow. Lean on your tools: Consider what story currents may be present in your situation. Perhaps remind yourself what your targets are, and look for touchstones in your memories. 

Take your time to understand and navigate your feelings. This material isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be here when you’re ready

1.

I knew exactly what fainting felt like.  

The world will go off-kilter, spinning a little or a lot. Your mind will begin to float away from your body, and if you don’t put your head between your knees, black will creep into your vision at the corners, speckling everything you see with dark spots.

All of these sensations hit me one day, an hour before a crew race. I stood beside a boat our coach had instructed us to put together. Rain fell over my shoulders. Chill sank into my bones. I knew what was coming.

In case you’re not familiar with this sport, a crew team is made up of smaller teams. At the college level, each group commits to their own boat for competitions, with five- or nine-person slots: either four or eight rowers, plus their coxswain (typically a slender individual who directs and steers the boat while the others row). It’s the same motion, over and over, but the more perfectly all of you move in unison, the faster the boat will go. 

It is a beautiful sport, full of watery views and sunrises. It is a brutal sport, full of 4:45-to-5AM wakeup calls, facing the elements before you’ve had any coffee and living with blisters all over your hands for weeks at a time.

I had been rowing for six years, since I was thirteen.

That fainting feeling had been hounding me all week. The worst episode had struck me a few days before. It was so bad that I’d called a halt in the middle of a row, stopping my teammates in our boat in the middle of the river, something I’d never done before.

I couldn’t continue practice. I was too dizzy. All the way back to the dock, I couldn’t row. This is not the same as raising your hand in soccer, field hockey, lacrosse practice. You don’t sit out on the sidelines. If you need to stop in the middle of practice on a crew team, you are still riding in a boat with the rest of your teammates. You become dead weight that your teammates have to carry. Plus, to keep the boat balanced, a second person had to drop out, and the weight of a nine-person boat fell to six rowers until we returned to dock.

Because I couldn’t push through my dizziness, my illness was more than disruptive. It changed the planned practice—instead of trying for more speed, the other people in my boat had a strength training exercise.

My teammates were gracious about it. I was mortified. I knew I needed to stop and rest. I’d been sick, on and off, since the end of the previous semester. I also knew that there was no one to replace me. In fact, a lot of other people had already quit the crew team. We were signed up for a race that weekend, and if I took the time my body was asking for, my boat would be missing one person. Eight of my teammates wouldn’t be able to race.

So, I compromised. I took the next morning off, to sleep in and rest. Though my body felt better by the time I woke up, my heart felt conflicted. I was letting my teammates down, and I knew it. I stopped by the new head coach’s office to talk it over. I described my symptoms. I described how long I’d been feeling badly and how acute my dizziness had been in the boat the day before. I acknowledged that this was a predicament, since the other girls in the boat deserved to race, and I invited him to figure out a solution with me.

The assistant coach had known me for a semester longer than the head coach. She remembered how hard I’d worked before I had started getting sick. She looked at me with sympathy. Then she turned to the head coach, her boss, with a forceful and expectant stare, like there had been words between them before I’d come.  

The coach squirmed in his seat. He turned away from his computer and faced me. I could hear the frustration in his voice as he said: “It’s hard for me, being a new coach, with this ‘phantom’ illness—”

He actually used the air quotes, and something in me closed like a door slamming.

Thus, this man was forever stricken from my list of reasonable adults, having proved himself as neither adult nor reasonable.

Now that years have passed, I know that this coach was half a decade younger than I am at the time I write this. He was too immature and inexperienced for the position. I didn’t see this at the time, but looking back, I knew that this was obvious to the assistant coach, who was maybe two years younger than he was. I saw disgust in the way she rolled her eyes, saw the banked fury in the way she leaned back and turned her face away.

Furious and determined. I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to come through for my teammates.

So, I decided to go to the race. In the spring season, races last ten minutes long or less. I reasoned that I could handle ten minutes.

I’d done it before.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, I’d had an ear infection so deep inside that it muffled my hearing. I’d taken antibiotics and two days off to sleep. Then, on Saturday morning, still running fever, I’d raced with my team and won a bronze medal. 

But everybody learns eventually: the body has limits. You can push it, but not forever.

I went to the race, ignoring my fatigue, my dizziness, and my growing nausea. Before the race, despite the misting rain, I started putting the boat together with the rest of the teammates.

In the cold wet, the world began to spin, and the edges of my vision started to go dark. I turned away to go back inside, to the bus, where it was warm and dry. My last conscious thought was, “If I faint right now, it’ll serve Coach right for talking about this ‘phantom’ illness.”  

Then I woke up in a puddle beside the boat, with no memory of falling. I’d been there for long enough for water to soak through several layers of clothing.

“Shelby, what are you doing?” my coxswain asked, half-laughing, as if I was joking around like usual.

When I didn’t answer her, when I struggled to sit up, she realized something was deeply wrong. She directed two other teammates to help to my feet, and they half-carried me back on the bus. She explained to the coaches and to the team captains that I had fainted, that she’d found me in a puddle.

One of the captains turned to me, concerned, and asked, “Do you have dry clothes to change into?”  

I understood exactly what she said, but I didn’t have the words to answer her. I could not find the word for yes inside my mind or even remember how to nod. Instead, I dug in my bag, found my spare clothes, and showed them to her.  

“Good,” she said, not realizing—as I did—that something was much more wrong than any of us had suspected, much worse than simply fainting.  

I could understand words, glean meaning from sentences, but I couldn’t form them.

That captain ended up rowing twice—one race in her own boat, and one race in my place. That isn’t ideal, because racing once is enough to leave your body totally depleted. I could see the exhaustion in her when she returned from the second race, and when I got my words back, well into evening, when it was already dark, I thanked her.

Later, but not much later, I would officially quit the team. Later, the fainting feeling was diagnosed as plain vertigo. Walking back from the library toward my dorm, I noticed the way my feet couldn’t carry me in a straight line. I would fall into walls, even clumsier than usual. Constantly nauseated, I barely ate. I would consider taking a leave of absence without finishing the semester, but I did not. I pushed through the last couple months of school, taking half-hearted exams and writing terrible end-of-term papers. 

Later, during the summer, my family doctor would suggest that I get an MRI, quietly pointing out that vertigo is a warning symptom of a brain tumor. We would be relieved to find out that it wasn’t. What I had instead was a scarring around the eighth cranial nerve, which impacts both the balance and nausea centers of the brain. In other words, when I’d pushed through and raced with that inner ear infection, I’d caused nerve damage in my brain.  

It was permanent—the vertigo and nausea would always be a part of my life—but my brain was young and malleable. It would reroute around the scar, and the vertigo and nausea wouldn’t be an everyday occurrence.

But that day, the day I woke wordless in a puddle, I didn’t know it. That day, I sat on the bus in my warm, dry clothes and my warmest layers, speechless and shaking. I didn’t know anything except that words had abandoned me, that something was broken inside me. Tears leaked down my face, and I could not stop them or speak to the teammates who tried to comfort me.

When I was little, my mom once told me that it was a blessing to know what your worst day was: It gave you perspective. It gave you confidence. It gave you the certainty that if you could survive that, you could survive whatever situation was in front of you. 

My mother’s worst day was the day her father died, and I still don’t know what my worst day is, was, or shall be.

But I do know this day on the bus was the day I felt the most fear.

It was the day I lost my words for an entire afternoon. To others, that problem may sound small, but remember: I am a writer.  

If I can’t articulate an experience, how do I survive it? Without words, can I express who I am?

2.

By my early twenties, I could comfortably explain my vertigo whenever it came up. I could tell strangers where it had came from and how it had improved.

I started calling it, “my barometer.” Whenever my vertigo and my nausea came back, it was a clear sign that I was pushing myself too hard, that I needed to take it easy.

But this is what I didn’t tell people: whenever the vertigo returned, raw fear came roaring back with it. It didn’t matter why I started to feel dizzy, whether it was too much sodium or too little sleep, fear reached the same depths.

Whenever I succumbed to some minor illness, I also wrote desperate pages in my journal, wondering why I still couldn’t take care of myself. During my deadline-heavy twenties, I was sick enough that I started to believe I’d started an unbreakable habit of yoyo-ing between overworking myself into a literal fever and the full stops I needed to recover from those fevers.

You may think that I’m only talking about writing deadlines, but this isn’t so.

Once, at my job, just before the holidays, my team had a series of end-of-year deadlines we couldn’t budge. All three of us got the same flu: congestion, fever, and a deep cough. This was years before the pandemic when the entire planet was forced to learn how to stop and stay home when you’re sick. Instead, all three of us pushed through.

Even at the time, I knew I was making the same choice I’d made in college—I was choosing the team over my health, and in a state of fury, I moved from the drafts of one project to the endless files of another project. I was furious with the deadlines, and with the people who behind those deadlines, and with myself for putting myself in this situation again.

I was hugely fun to be around, let me tell you.  

I stormed into the office to prepare for a meeting, furious too that I couldn’t even work from home while I was running fever. Then I stepped into the office of my supervisor, also flushed with fever. Her hacking cough sounded exactly the same as mine, and I recognized the flash of fear on her face.

This woman had always been pretty open about her own health. She’d had a health scare about a decade prior. Unlike my situation, her life had actually been in danger. Still was, technically, but she managed her condition with diligence, honesty, and unspoken courage.

I looked at her, and I knew exactly what she was feeling—I was feeling it too.

“When you get sick like this,” I said, “does it bring it all back? The time before you got it under control?”

She looked startled, but she said, “Yes.” 

“When you get sick and don’t get better right away, do you sometimes feel like you’ll never get well again?” I asked.

She looked a little caught-out, a little relieved, and very very tired. “Sometimes,” she said.

“You and I are going to get through this meeting,” I said, “and we’re going to wrap it up as quickly as possible. Then we’re both going to go back home and rest.”

She agreed. We headed into that meeting, which she had to lead, and she powered through with great skill. I did my part with as much gusto as I could muster. Then we both went home and went to bed.

From that day on, we continued on by being very frank and often forceful about watching out for the other person’s health. If one of us didn’t feel well, for example, we told them to go home and take care of ourselves. If one of us worked late, we would say, Time to wrap up for the night and get some rest.  

In other words, we changed our approach: instead of taking one for the team, we watched out for our teammates. We began to safeguard their wellbeing as well as our own.

3.

When 2018 began, I was sick of being sick: I’d had flus and sinus infections and bronchitis one after another. On top of that, I’d been diagnosed with asthma in early 2016, and since I was more overweight and out of shape than I’d ever been, I was coughing and puffing my inhaler even on healthy days. I’d gotten tired of living this way. 

In other words, at the beginning of 2018, change was on the menu. I was determined to be healthy.

My first move was to do what other people did: I started going to the gym. Specifically, I started going to barre classes down the street from my apartment. The studio walls had messages I liked: “Be Strong,” “Be Powerful,” etc. I had high hopes. I even invited my mother along.

It did not go as planned, because I had forgotten something about myself:

I had a problem with authority.

To be more specific, I had a problem with an instructor acting like they had more authority over my body than I did myself. Going back to these classes started bringing back memories of crew team conditioning: in the middle of weight-lifting or sprints, I would gauge what my body could handle, and then I would push past my perceived limits at the promptings of a coach or a captain.

Encouragement like this is fabulous for someone who has never thought of herself as athletic. When she shifts through that mental block, she will feel truly powerful. This barre class was full of women having that experience, and the program worked wonderfully for them.

However, for a former athlete who was trying to reconnect to her body, this approach was less than ideal. In fact, I found it completely annoying. In barre class, you are muscle training using largely your own body weight to grow stronger; to tone certain muscles, you contort yourself into strange shapes. Instead of listening to my body, heeding what it told me it could handle, I kept listening to the instructor’s prompts. As a result, I kept getting injured, straining something in my back or pinching something in my hip—old crew injuries physically resurfacing with a vengeance.

But I kept going back, week after week. I was determined to feel good again, determined to take care of my body better than I ever had before.  

Then, in the middle of a class, I changed my mind.

The instructor was urging us on, telling us to move into one more weird shape. Internally, I debated skipping this particular exercise, because it was really similar to one where I pulled my back a few weeks ago. The instructor, a very nice young lady, passed by, cheering us: “You can do it! This one will make your inner thighs look amazing!”

Clarity struck like a bell. I did not need my inner thighs to look amazing. I had not come to that class for appearances’ sake. I had come to class to bring my body back into its strength, power, and health. If that was my target, maybe I didn’t need class. Maybe I just needed to reconnect with my body, starting with not letting other people make decisions for it.

At the end of class, I told my mom that I wasn’t coming back, and I never returned. I chose to not force my body to do something it did not enjoy, just because the exercise was “good” for me (or my inner thighs).

Instead of gym classes and dieting, I reconsidered nourishment—movement, for example, could be a feast: I dedicated myself to rambling through my neighborhood, during evenings and weekends. I would walk for miles and for hours, listening to podcasts and to audiobooks. I would walk to the library or the store instead of drive, carrying groceries and bouquets of flowers past my first elementary school. I would search out the urban wildlife—hawks, owls, a fox and her kits. On warm summer nights, rambling down my street, I searched out the fireflies in the bushes and the moon in the sky.

I chose new recipes, not because they were healthy, but out of the delight and challenge of trying something new. I chose fitness classes, not because I wanted to push my body into shape, because a friend invited me to try them with her.

Since then, I have stopped from needing my asthma inhaler at least once a day. Sometimes, I even forget to bring it with me. Instead of getting sinus infections and bronchitis every couple months, I only needed antibiotics once a year, which is a huge improvement for someone. I also did lose a noticeable amount of weight, but I hesitate to mention that. It was never about the weight.

This was about taking responsibility for my body’s well-being rather than ceding control to a coach or an instructor, a training regimen or a deadline.

It was me learning to care for my body in the same gentle way I took care of other parts of my life.  

This was learning to tell myself: I am not broken. I am learning the art of self-tending.