The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Like many other humans on this planet, I have a gift that keeps on giving. Long COVID. (My version is a seemingly permanently altered sense of taste and smell). But technically speaking I had “Long Something” way before I ever had the disease.
Sometimes things just keep on giving well after the initial crisis ends.
What is Long COVID you ask? According to the CDC:
Some people who have been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can experience long-term effects from their infection, known as Post-COVID Conditions (PCC) or Long COVID.
People call Post-COVID Conditions by many names, including: Long COVID, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC), long-term effects of COVID, and chronic COVID.
Basically some of the symptoms that one experiences from the disease can recur and persist even without the virus being active. These symptoms can very from mild to debilitating and can last for a short time to seemingly forever.
But COVID isn’t the only condition that can have consequences long after the initial manifestation.
My particular version of Long COVID is altered taste and also “brain fog”. (The latter being debatable as I’ve never been accused of being the “stay focused and on task” type).
My last confirmed bout of Covid-19 was after an evening of debauchery during Halloween of 2021, and for months after my recovery I didn’t experience any lasting symptoms of the disease … until about six months later when I ate some french fries.
At first I thought that the establishment that had served me those deep fried slivers of potato needed to have a health code inspection. They tasted rotten. A flavor I’d never experienced before. It was like tasting something you’ve only smelled, in this case the smell of two week old food waste that had been sitting in a hot dumpster for several weeks.
I mentioned this to the person sitting across from me, and they tasted my fries and offered up the suggestion that I was nuts. They tasted just fine to them, so I immediately wondered if I was having a relapse.
I wasn’t.
Skip ahead a few weeks (time that did not include any more french fries) and I had some lettuce on a burger … and I had the same taste reaction. I actually dissected my meal, tasting the individual pieces to see what was causing the “flavor”, and I discovered that certain types of vegetation seemed to be my nemesis. Again, I was concerned that the disease was still raging in my system.
Skip ahead another couple of weeks and I was enjoying a bad habit that nonetheless brings me joy, smoking a fine cigar. There is nothing like sipping a little spiced rum, slowly smoking a nice stogie, and relaxing for an hour in the backyard. Well, until that cigar tastes like it was made from rotten seaweed.
Since multiple weeks had passed since my initial taste revulsion, I could no longer blame my reaction on an active disease. I obviously had the long variety. And to this day, a year and a half later, I still have a list of things that I can no longer tolerate putting in my mouth.
BUT! The story can’t end there.
So what if I can’t smoke a cigar or eat french fries? There are a million other things that I can enjoy. And yes this is harder to say than do. Eating out is difficult, but honestly there are more options to try than what I can’t. I have lots of new possibilities, right?
Except, of course, for when new taste treats are discovered that I don’t yet know will taste like garbage. LOL!
So as I was pondering this dilemma, this crossroads of living my life either in avoidance of evil or in a quest of new things great and possible, I realized that there are other conditions that have “long” repercussions … and not all of them start with a virus. Sometimes they start with imprinting.
Have you ever heard of Human Imprinting?
The technical definition is “learning that occurs at a certain age that is independent of the consequences of behavior”. But what it really means is that when you’re a child your brain is … gooey. Un-fused. Just random strands of unfinished wiring. Your entire being is just waiting for some electrician to come wire things up for ya.
Enter society, your family and friends, your neighborhood. Everything that you were taught was the absolute truth as a wee person, and everything you believed as a result of that input. And here’s the thing … once your wiring is completed, it’s permanent. As in, no force on earth is going to un-learn you what you just learned.
And so decades later, when you‘re reading yet another article where scientists are shaking their heads ruefully and reminding folks that the earth isn’t flat like your Uncle Bob told you at the age of four-and-a-half, a part of your permanently wired brain is going to stand up and shout “the earth IS as flat as a pancake!”.
You’re going to have this debate inside yourself where logic and knowledge describe an oblate spheroid circling a main-sequence yellow dwarf star.
And still those pre-wired foundations of your brain are going to say that nope, Earth looks like a green and blue pizza pie with water falling off the edges.
And perhaps with a turtle holding it up on its back.
Why are you going to have this debate inside yourself? Because that flat earth nonsense was imprinted on you. And you can’t rewire it. And even though the outside world sees you as this smart human being, inside your brain you will always have these raging fights with your learning as a four-and-a-half year old. Internal fights that you will never admit in public, because having people know what was actually burnt inside your brain is just way too embarrassing.
So what does this have to do with Long COVID, you ask?
Let’s say that some random child, as they were growing up in an environment that lacked creativity and flexibility, had events and knowledge imprinted on their slowly solidifying brain that left them believing that they were not as good as they could be. As they should be. All of the usual conflicts between reality and expectations. That was the equivalent of having the disease.
Skip ahead a certain period of time and when that child-now-adult makes decisions, they are often left with a bad taste in their mouth. It doesn’t matter that have studied and gained knowledge on a subject. It’s of no consequence that they have direct experience in a matter. That imprinting resurfaces and they suffer as a result of it. Everything that happened years ago is now happening again in a completely different environment and set of circumstances. That’s the long version of the disease.
OK, the analogy is a little weak but the resolution isn’t.
Regardless of whether one suffers from Imposter Syndrome, or if they have relationship expectations that they believe they can never live up to, or any of a thousand other false beliefs … the “long version” of these problems are either based on what was imprinted on them, or on what was always assumed to be true and thus was the basis for a permanent life plan.
I have a YouTube channel, a podcast, and these Medium and Patreon articles where I delve into the conditions of how humans work. I strive to personally improve my life and to share a world outside of constraints as I wander the planet in a converted school bus with my partner.
And I’m also a fraud in both the relationship and self-improvement guru departments … or so I believe. That and I can’t eat iceberg lettuce anymore.
So we finally have come to the crossroads. That place where we have to decide how we will react when the raging symptoms of a long-ago disease return. Do we continue to order french fries in various establishments, hoping for a variety that doesn’t taste foul? Complaining all the while because every brand has that oh so wonderful sensation on our tongue?
Or do we step outside of ourselves and live our lives based on new possibilities?
I am personally truly upset that I can’t smoke cigars anymore. Yes they stink and will probably kill me off early, but there was something so soothing about taking an hour to myself. There is no way to smoke a cigar quickly, so the activity naturally slows you down. And that’s no longer a possibility for my own version of weird personal therapy.
I am also upset that I can’t shake the notion that whatever knowledge I acquire and whatever critical thinking I use to ponder those facts leaves me with another bad taste in my mouth. The one where my idiotic whispering voice tells me that I’m not thinking like I was taught, and thus I’m wrong.
So … choices.
We can either complain or we can try to dig ourselves out of our holes. We can wallow in what happened to us in history past, or we can step outside of ourselves, find some truth, and start to believe in our futures. Seek alternatives instead of repeating that which doesn’t serve us.
Personally I will find alternatives to my filthy cigar habit so I can relax and calm my soul. I will eat the other ten-and-a-half million available foods that don’t taste like rotten swill. And most importantly … I will stop listening to my internal voices and instead find ways of believing in the truth instead of those past untruths.
Bad things in our past can have long-term repercussions. Long COVID is just an example of a physical manifestation of the condition. But it’s our emotional and mental responses that define how they can and will impact us in the long run.
French fries? I’m better off without them. Imposter Syndrome? Don’t need that either. The myriad of other symptoms that I take as limitations? Time to find alternatives.
Because Long Fill-In-The-Blank does not have control over me.