When I’ve been sick for a bit, here are some things that may be true:

  • I haven’t exercised lately

  • I have developed a vague background sense that I’m fragile and if I were to exercise it should be by walking around the garden or something

  • I’m dressed in what is too shlubby to even count as comfortable

  • I am otherwise behind on some basic life things that take effort and are normally subsidized by social incentives, e.g. showering, putting tissues in the bin, eating things that aren’t power crunch bars

  • I am habitually avoiding other people

  • I am habitually avoiding places where other people go

  • I am habitually treating myself as a contamination threat

  • I’ve been lying around in bed quite a bit

I posit that a problem with this is that these things are somewhat self reinforcing, so the period of indisposition can insidiously take hold and last substantially longer than the sickness. Feeling unfit, poorly dressed, fragile, gross and contaminatory make various things less appealing, such as visiting a gym, seeing other people, going to the office, leaving one’s room at all, leaving one’s bed at all, embarking on ambitious tidying up ventures.

Worse, it is fairly ambiguous when one stops being sick, so there may not be a moment where it’s very clear you should change your behavior, especially if you continue to feel vaguely bad from these depression-flavored lifestyle factors.

Last time I was sick for a while I was in a fairly good mood during the sickness itself, but was relatively depressed for maybe a month afterwards, which I suspect is related to this kind of thing.

I was sick last week, and seemed to be better on Saturday. To avoid this kind of problem this time, I had an idea: an official end to sickness ritual, where you abruptly do all the things a non-sick person would do, and reset your expectations about yourself.

This was is my tentative ritual plan:

  • exercise: run to the gym and do 15m+ intense exercise

  • groom: shower, shave, apply substances to body, dress nice

  • share air: go to a cafe, get a manicure

  • Share more (optional): share a drink, share a kiss

These are designed to often hit multiple factors (share a drink: saliva, socializing, unhealthy behavior that can self-signal non-fragility!)

I wrote this draft up to about here, then set out to try it out. I started out in bed, with a bit of a headache, my mouth tasting like powercrunch bar and time. Going to the gym seemed like not what to do. I intended to report back.

A first obstacle with this plan was that it was actually like 6:30pm by the time I finished writing down this idea, and it turns out that gyms, cafes and nail salons near me mostly consider that past their bedtime.

I’m a member of three different gyms near me though, and one of them was still open for half an hour, so I briefly emotionally reckoned with the fact that I really had to go to the gym RIGHT NOW if I was going to make this work, then got a move on.

I put on some shoes and went out, intending to run there. It was excitingly rainy, and the cars seemed to have a shared sense that politeness to pedestrians is a kind of luxury nobody can afford in this weather. Happily the run was short. The gym is actually a climbing gym with a bit of gym equipment in the back, a tiny bit of it cardio-directed, exactly one machine of which was not taken. So I jumped on and started cycling, without sparing moments to figure out how to adjust it to my height or anything. I think I flipped between being present, thinking thoughts like “okay that’s three minutes, I only have to do that four more times…” and playing a game on my phone. It was okay. I did it, just as the gym was closing. Check.

Ok, now if I wanted to get a manicure, I needed to change the order of things, because the two purportedly still open were closing at 8, and painting fingernails takes time. The one across the road looked intensely not open. So I set off jogging toward the one five minutes away. This was a bit more ‘race against time scavenger hunt’ style than I had had in mind, but that’s a thing that works for me. I saw a friend walking parallel across the street, and we had a friendly but confusing mimed conversation in which he seemed to indicate that he would like to race me to the corner, so I ran there but then he seemed to have a restaurant to go into, so we waved goodbye. (Social interaction: check!)

The nail salon of my hopes had light and someone painting someone else’s nails inside it, but the door was locked. Was this such a dicey part of town that they just came and unlocked the door for registered guests or something? I waited a little until what looked like a convenient break in the nail-painting and knocked, but the woman painting nails indicated that I couldn’t come in. I was at a bit of a loss then. I didn’t want to give up, but I also didn’t want to go considerably further away to considerably less real looking nail salons. I considered going to the body-decoration shop right there that was open, but they seemed to sell tattoos and additional body piercings, which I didn’t seem to be any more down for than usual. It also glowed with an eerie futuristic blue light, and if this was to be the day I got a tattoo that probably wouldn’t be the vibe I’d go for.

I looked more for suitable replacements, and found a tiny inside area with shops I’d never seen. I went into a pool bar and downstairs into their giant pool basement, which had a vast number of pool tables and quite a few people, so that’s kind of surprising and good to know.

Even if I didn’t find a good replacement per se, I was feeling good about my exploration of the town around me. In a perhaps overambitious act of non-fragility I went into the McDonalds a couple of blocks from my house. I indeed found the visit slightly intense, and left after merely looking at the menu.

I got home and moved on to becoming clean and well kept. I realized I actually had a party to go to with a dress code: business casual (which I understood to be humorous fancy dress, not serious). So I got pretty professional, which is not what I generally do professionally.

My boyfriend also emerged from some friend-visiting and wished to go to the party pronto, so I made a dash to a local board game cafe that is actually open till late and got a decaf latte to complete my outfit and my tentative ritual plan, then headed over to share air and eventually a drink.

A couple of days later, evidence is consistent with this helping. I’m in a very good mood at least, and today went on a bike ride and hike, and to a cafe and a restaurant. My friend pointed out to me that I could consider including other people in my ‘celebration’ next time, so that’s an interesting idea.