Reflections On Leaving: Notes From A Progressed Balsamic Moon Phase

Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash

This is one of those anniversaries no one wants to have. It's been one year today since I got COVID, one year since I last exercised without consequence, one year since I didn't have a giant question mark hanging over my health, my body, my future.

Maybe it's just that I've been relatively protected up until now, but long COVID has been probably the most brutal experience of my life, and I'm still nowhere near the severe end of the spectrum. I am both unlucky to be in this category at all, and also very lucky that I can still walk, work, and cautiously follow through on my travel plans next month. All three of those things still come with new limitations that I'm trying to get used to.

I will say that it got worse before it got better. I owe part of that to finding a few helpful interventions after months of researching treatments and seeing way too many specialists. I also owe a lot of that to acceptance. The six-month milestone was probably the hardest, both because I was getting definitively worse, not better, and also because it was becoming clear at that point that I might not heal from this anytime soon. On Thanksgiving I tried to help with dinner, but it was too hard to stand on my feet for very long, so I sat down to chop vegetables. After about a minute of that, I had to give up, because I was too fatigued to even keep my arms raised at table height. I cried so much that week. It felt, in that moment, like my future was over before it even began. I felt a sort of caustic grief, not just for myself, but for everyone suffering from poorly understood post-viral illnesses that have no cure, who were knocked down often in the prime of their life, who are completely bedbound with ME/CFS, unable to even read or watch TV or hold a conversation. I knew then that it wasn't a given that I'd improve, or that I couldn't backslide and become like that too.

Then I got better, then I got a lot worse again, and then I got better again. In March, I moved, and had to pace myself rigorously to get through packing, final appointments in the city, and seeing friends. 

I definitely wouldn't rather have cancer, but sometimes I think about how I'd have to explain myself a lot less if I did. Most people hear "chronic fatigue" and think, "oh, so, you're tired." It's more that my brain and my nerves are inflamed, that my cells can't metabolize energy the way they're supposed to, that my resting heart rate wavers between 90 and 110 when I stand up. Over the winter, I could barely do an hour or two of work on the computer without having to lay down because I felt concussed. During bad flares, the noise sensitivity can be outright painful. It has taken me days, at times, to recover from the exertion of going up and down stairs on the subway, from standing on my feet too long, from entertaining guests in my home for a couple of hours, and on my worst days, from simply taking a 15-minute walk to the grocery store. For a brief period, I found myself needing to lay down every time I got out of the shower. Since I got to Florida a month ago and haven't had to put my body through the strain of city life, I actually had a streak of a couple weeks where I didn't crash at all, where I barely had any fatigue. Then I curled my hair with a curling iron and have been in another flare for the last four days. It's fucking weird like that!

I am doing my best, now, to focus more on what I'm gaining in the short-term than what I've lost. I'm trying not to piss myself off by thinking about all the experiences I might have had over the last year if I still had my health, or how I miss dancing most of all. A couple weeks of no fatigue is huge. So is the fact that I'm actually not struggling too much with cognitive exertion anymore. The other week, I was able to cook dinner without crashing. I wasn't sure if I'd be in any condition to travel next month, but it looks like I'm going, albeit carefully. 

Throughout this whole ordeal, I kept thinking to myself, "this is what it feels like to be a moon with withering light." I am in the darkest hour of my progressed balsamic moon phase. One year post-infection, and one year pre-new moon. The moon gets tired too, it seems. The moon relates to the body, and its perils, its vulnerabilities.

Demetra George compares the progressed balsamic phase to roughly 4 to 6 a.m. in the morning, a time when "the complexities of day consciousness are silenced so you can attune yourself to subtle spiritual energy," to see more clearly what is true and false in your life, to recognize the instinctual wisdom in your body.

My balsamic moon phase basically began with the pandemic in 2020. As the world closed down, I went inward, and into isolation. I spent this phase living alone, arrested in a liminal space between what my life was and what it's going to be. 

I think we all had this experience to some degree, but then again, we've all had very different pandemics. Some people lost jobs and loved ones. Some people got married and had babies. Some people carried on like nothing had changed. I carved out a space for myself in a city that a lot of my friends had already left, for my solitude and retreat and survival and continued learning. I was thankful to still have a job, to have some friends still nearby, and to have an astrology business that was growing and leading me in new directions. But the overwhelming texture of this moment was one of nullness, an empty pause before the orchestra starts up again. One day, in the winter of 2021, I spent hours circling around the question of whether I trusted myself or not, and I marveled at the dimensions of what that would even really mean.

I imagine the balsamic moon as a figure resembling a worn-out husk, a hand that can't retain all the sand slipping through its fingers. Maybe it's a hand in the process of figuring out that it doesn't actually make sense to try.

It's been amazing to me how much that metaphor has paralleled the very literal decluttering process of reducing my worldly possessions to a pile of stuff I can fit in the back of a car. In 2020, my parents sold their house in New Jersey, the one they lived in for more than twenty years. I went home for a couple weeks then, to help them sort through my old childhood things. I noted at the time how it felt like I was reviewing, processing, and composting an entire cycle of life that was now winding down. I was deciding what to carry with me physically into the next cycle, what to stamp into my memory for safekeeping, and what to forget entirely. 

In the spring of 2023, I more or less finished the job when I emptied out my New York City apartment. I sold off all my furniture, gave a lot of stuff away to my friends, and blessed the neighbors with some stoop finds. I quit my full-time job, gave up my apartment, and dissolved the entire life that I built here during the height of my full moon phase. This seems necessary, somehow. The complete release, the totality of the ending. Taking only the things my hands can carry. At the end of the cycle, all that's left is to become a seed stripped down to its bare essence, fully detached from the plant, free to blow around on the winds of circumstance. 

Something I think is maybe more than a coincidence is how I first started dreaming of leaving New York to live nomadically not even a month before I got sick. I also signed up to work with a functional medicine team that month too, wanting to address the root cause of why I always felt more tired than I should. (Ironically, I think I might know the answer now, thanks to COVID. My bloodwork shows high levels of reactivated Epstein-Barr, the early antigen. I think it's very possible that the mono I had in high school was the culprit all along, and that it was extremely mild until COVID kicked it into high gear.) 

What I'm not going to say is that there's a higher reason why these things need to happen, or that illness is inherently spiritual, or any other bullshit like that. But in more ways than one, COVID has felt like a bit of a healing crisis. It's a kamikaze approach to figuring out the root cause, the gonzo journalism of going through a death process. It's a crisis, just not one that I can really guarantee the end of. 

After I got over the heartbreak of having my arbitrary timeline messed up by my illness, I started to come around to the viewpoint that I was simply being rerouted. Maybe I didn't need to be in such a rush to start my travels. Maybe it'll be good to have this time with my parents while we're all still around. Maybe it'll be healing, in more ways than one, to come back to them and be held for awhile. Maybe it would have been entirely too much all at once to move out of New York, ramp up my business, and figure out life in a new country every month or two. Maybe this is just creating a more gentle off-ramp for myself, and I don't really need to launch myself out of a cannon and into a brazenly unfamiliar way of life. I am respecting my body's imperative to slow down and take my time.

I am thinking back to what I heard someone else say a couple years back, about her own balsamic moon phase. I wrote it down then, and I am still thinking about it now, and considering it like a mantra. She said, "Maybe I don't need to be afraid. Maybe it's going to be amazing."