2024 Wrapped, in blankets

Spending the last week of 2024 and the first week of 2025 of the year sick

Jan 04, 2025

∙ Paid

So long 2024. Here we go 2025!, I might say if I had not just spent the last 10 days sick in bed, drinking tea, trying not to cough myself into oblivion. The violence of my own coughs have surprised, and at times, impressed me. Internet wisdom tells us that during a cough you release air at the speed of over 50 miles an hour. These biological tornados have, in the past week, upended my stomach and closed off my windpipe, making me feel like I was caught underwater with a broken snorkle.

The aftermath left little energy for retrospective thinking or forward-planning. Friend meet-ups were canceled, gallons of tea were drunk, and many half-read and unread books were pulled from their dusty spots on my shelves and consumed at a competitve speed. Who was I trying to beat? My Instagram-scrolling, Wikipedia k-hole deep diving self, most likely, to keep them from taking over.

I did not heed the inner voice that told me to rest and play more during my visit home to Minnesota for Christmas, so my body decided to strike the unfair labor conditions, and unlike the Amazon and Teamster strikes, it won.

This was a real lesson in limitations. I even had a dream right before I got sick that I was at a grocery store with Chapell Roan (I know, how lucky am I?). She was ahead of me in line and was trying to pay for her groceries with a credit card, which kept getting declined. I woke up from the dream knowing that this was about energy and not money.

Chappell Roan, who is currently at the height of her pop star powers has talked about “saying no to pretty much everything” as a way to preserve her sanity. I’m sure at that level, your perception of what “everything” is gets skewed with the outsized, often unreasonable, demands on your time. But we mortals can take this lesson to heart without having to reach super-stardom. Having the dream made me remember that saying no and setting limits doesn’t get easier just because you have more options and are more successful.

I have written a lot about people pleasing and how damaging it has been to my life. I’m not going to blame people pleasing for my exhaustion this time, but I am going to blame all the shoulds I kept running through my head as I decided I knew what was best for me - aka, to work more, play less. As a freelancer especially, it’s easy to should your way through the week and forget that recharging often saves time - in my case 10 days of cough-induced misery.

My first episode of The Side Woo is out now and my first guest of the year, Allison Schulnik, is a great example of someone who dropped the shoulds. After a rise to art world stardom in the mid-2010s, she moved her family to Sky Valley in the desert, uses a dumb phone and a landline for communication, and said before we did our talk that she hadn’t been on a Zoom call since the pandemic. (Whhhaaaa?)

While not all of that is achievable for everyone, the core of her decisions was based on a universal idea: finding that internal compass and listening to it, despite fears of missing out or becoming irrelevant as an artist.

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Anyway, to all those out there who are sick like me right now, and to those who are managing their energy like a Jedi master, may you all have a nice start to the year.

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