Jody Day
As I move through my second year of Long Covid, with its attendant very low energy levels, I’m having to take a hard look at how much my idea of myself and my identity is tied to productivity. And I’ve been thinking how that relates to my non-productivity as a non-mother and non-grandmother too.
Over the fifteen years since I created Gateway Women, I’ve lost count of the times that people have said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you do it all!’ and I’ve shrugged it off, because I was always more attuned to what wasn’t getting done: the podcast I never started; the book about the specific experience of being both single and childless I didn’t write; the workshops that didn’t sell; the documentaries I was filmed for (three of them!) that never made it to the screen due to lack of funding; the meetups I created that no one turned up for. As an entrepreneur, people see and remember what worked, not the many things that didn’t happen or didn’t work. I wish I had been more appreciative of my own capacity for incredibly hard work and output during those years, most of it unpaid, and had taken those comments as the compliments (and perhaps warnings) that they were.
During most of that time, I was unpartnered too, and I can see how my studies to become a psychotherapist, as well as my efforts creating and sustaining Gateway Women, were the twin poles I hitched my flag to: work was my identity. I can’t do that anymore.
As someone who manages a couple of chronic conditions already (and let’s not forget unexplained infertility), I’m not unused to dealing with the restrictions of health conditions on my goals and dreams. But combining my existing health issues with Long Covid, as well as a more inward, deeply reflective shift as I move through my sixties, I’ve had to dig very deep into ‘who’ I am to adjust to the fact that I now move at a much slower pace, or can be wiped out for a few days by even a minor ‘push’.
At the beginning of this year, and faced with the very real possibility of a life-threatening diagnosis (thankfully ruled out in June), I gave myself an entirely self-imposed deadline to finish the third draft of my novel about a single, childless, midlife woman by the end of October – but by midsummer I realised there was no way I was going to make it. Writing a novel holding a whole world in your head as you write - exactly the kind of cognitive expenditure that Long Covid has stolen from me. In order to have met my goal, I would have needed to be able to concentrate fully for two to four hours a day, five days a week - when in fact some days I can’t even write a shopping list. Ha! It seems the old driven version of me wasn’t planning on quitting any time soon!
Which brings me to my Irish garden. This is only my second year of growing food, having longed for a garden for the thirty-odd years I lived in London.
For the medium amount of effort I put in, she has rewarded me with the most magically productive results that make my heart swell, and has kept my kitchen full of delicious food too. (Plus plenty of disasters because in gardening, like life, you learn from making mistakes.) My freezer is now full of everything you can think of made from tomatoes and potatoes, plus jams, chutneys and relishes stored up for the dark days ahead.
Gardening is the only activity I can engage in that doesn’t exhaust me, because she nourishes me as I nourish her; it’s a relationship, not a task. She also doesn’t ask, ‘Who are you?’ or judge me if I’m not doing things fast enough, or leave things too late. She’s forgiving towards me as I learn her ways.
Gardening works at nature’s speed, not the inhuman speed of a machine, and I’m learning that I am nature too, and that I have days when my growth is spurting and I’m producing fruit, and other days when nothing much seems to be happening.
So the question is, can I treat myself more like a garden, and trust that even when things look quiet, processes are powerfully underway out of sight?
Living in a profoundly rural area where almost every woman is a mother and grandmother, identities that fill up their inner and outer worlds without anyone questioning them about either their productivity or value, I still rely on my ‘output’ identity - answering ‘I’m a writer’ if asked. I’m wondering how I might shift that, and what I might say instead?
I don’t have an answer to this yet, and these are the kinds of things I ponder as I harvest the last tomatoes of the season and plant out my kale seedlings for the winter. The butterflies have eaten all the brussel sprouts, but I think there will be radicchio, carrots, parsnips and even pumpkins for Christmas. It’s enough to show for my year, for my life, when so many other goals, plans and dreams are derailed by chronic illness.
It’s enough to steward my little patch of this beautiful earth, and do my best to become a good ancestor, knowing that eventually I will once again become soil. It kind of puts productivity into perspective a bit, doesn’t it.
