COVID Is Still Here. We Just Stopped Talking About It.

Lockdown in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 2020

For the past week, I've been working with my lymphatic system.

For years, my body has carried swelling that would come and go. There were days when my clothes no longer fit comfortably and days when walking became painful. Like so many people living with multiple health conditions, it wasn't always obvious which symptom belonged to which diagnosis.

Was it my traumatic brain injury? Chronic pain? Hormones? Stress? Something else entirely?

Living in Berlin, accessing medical care can be a slow and exhausting process. Appointments take time. Specialists are difficult to find. Eventually, as many people living with chronic illness discover, you begin trying to understand your own body. You become both patient and investigator.

So I started small: dry brushing, gentle movement, lymphatic massage, and rolling my legs and abdomen. Within a few days, I noticed the swelling begin to decrease. My legs hurt less. My body felt as though something that had been unmoving was finally beginning to flow.

Then something unexpected happened. One morning, before I was fully awake, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling. The only way I can describe it is in terms of density. It felt as though my entire body was submerged in milk—thick, heavy, almost impossible to move through. It wasn't simply fatigue, nor was it sadness attached to a particular event. It was an expansive negativity that seemed to exist before thought itself. Moving felt almost impossible.

As I became fully awake, the feeling disappeared, although the physical pain remained. The next morning, it returned, but this time I wasn't observing it—I was inside it. Nothing mattered. Everything felt pointless. Even crying seemed pointless. I canceled my plans and stayed in bed most of the day. It wasn't because of pain or because I physically couldn't move. It was because movement itself seemed meaningless.

I've experienced grief. I've experienced trauma. I've experienced depression. But this felt different. It felt like my body was holding something I hadn't yet understood. So I became curious. If this feeling belonged somewhere, where did it begin?

At first, I assumed it would lead me back to my traumatic brain injury. My accident changed my life completely. But surprisingly, that wasn't where my mind went. Instead, I found myself somewhere else entirely: March 2020. COVID. Before my brain injury. Before so much of my life unraveled.

I had been traveling in Cambodia when the world began shutting down. Months earlier, I had become seriously ill. At the time, nobody knew what was happening to me. I remember lying awake, wondering whether I would stop breathing during the night, while doctors had no explanation. Later, I developed what we now call long COVID, before those words entered our vocabulary.

Then the borders began closing. Flights were canceled. Countries were shutting down. I managed to secure one of the last flights from Cambodia to Germany, but because I didn't have a German passport, there was a real possibility that I wouldn't be allowed onto the plane. I remember crying, begging, and watching other people in the airport crying too. The fear wasn't abstract. The possibility of becoming stranded during a global pandemic felt like a matter of life or death.

Eventually, I was allowed to board, but what stayed with me wasn't only the fear. It was the loneliness. Instead of feeling held, I felt responsible for carrying not only my own terror but also the frustration directed toward me.

I survived the long trip back to Germany. Then came lockdown. Then I lost the business I had spent years building. I spent my savings refunding people who had enrolled in my programs, and my income disappeared almost overnight. Germany's emergency support for freelancers arrived quickly enough that I was able to remain in Berlin. I often think about how different my life would have been if that support hadn't existed.

Then, in July 2021, just as the world slowly began reopening, I had my accident. Emergency brain surgery. A traumatic brain injury. Recovery became the next emergency. There was never space to process the first one.

Looking back now, I realize that I have spent years thinking about being stuck in Germany. I rarely considered that my body might also feel stuck. Now, years later, as swelling slowly decreases and movement begins to return, I find myself wondering if something else is moving, too. Perhaps grief. Grief that never had room to exist.

COVID changed all of us. Some people lost loved ones. Some lost relationships. Some lost careers. Some became disabled. Some continue living with long COVID. Many remain immunocompromised, navigating a world that largely behaves as though the pandemic ended years ago. We simply stopped talking about it.

As economies reopened, there seemed to be an unspoken expectation that we should move on. Return to work. Resume productivity. Be grateful. Adapt.

But what happens when bodies don't move on as quickly as economies do? What happens when society decides a crisis is over before our bodies do?

I don't think we've fully reckoned with what COVID did—not only medically or economically, but emotionally. There has been so much discussion about economic recovery, but much less about collective grief, much less about the nervous systems that never quite found their way back, and much less about the bodies that are still carrying it.

As I reflected on my own experience, I realized something else. During lockdown, there was a narrative that many of us would finally have time—time to write the novel, learn a language, reorganize our lives, or simply slow down. That wasn't my experience. COVID wasn't spacious. It wasn't restful. It wasn't an opportunity for reinvention. It was survival.

I was trying to stay healthy while living with what I would later understand as long COVID. I was trying to figure out how to continue to live in Germany a place I now called home. I was trying to hold onto my livelihood while watching years of work disappear. My nervous system wasn't slowing down. It was doing everything it could to survive.

I wonder how many of us are still living with that survival response. How many of us have never really had the opportunity to ask how COVID changed us—not just our careers or relationships, but our bodies, our sense of safety, our capacity to trust, and our ability to rest.

I also wonder how many of us still carry that feeling of being stuck. Not because we failed to move on, but because we were never really allowed to stop. Perhaps one lasting legacy of the pandemic is that we learned how to keep functioning while disconnected from our feelings and each other. We became productive again before we became whole again.

Maybe that is why so many people still feel exhausted, anxious, disconnected, or overwhelmed, even years later. Not because something is wrong with them, but because our bodies do not follow the same timeline as economies, governments, or headlines.

As I continue caring for my body—gently encouraging movement where there has been stagnation—I keep thinking about that word: stuck. It has described my body. It has described immigration. It has described disability. It has described bureaucracy. It has described grief.

Now, slowly, I am learning what it means to unstick myself. Not by forgetting what happened, but by finally allowing it to move.

Maybe healing begins there.

Not by pretending the pandemic is behind us, but by giving ourselves permission to ask a simple question: How has COVID continued to live in me?