Healing did not arrive in a bottle. It did not come from one doctor who finally understood what was wrong with me. There was no perfect treatment plan, no miracle supplement, no moment when someone looked at all my symptoms, joined the dots and handed me the answer.
In the beginning, it was almost the opposite. My symptoms started when the world was still trying to understand what Covid was. I was ill, but tests did not explain what was happening. Doctors often told me there was nothing wrong with me, while my body was telling me something very different.
So somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for one person to save me. Not because I stopped believing in medicine. I didn’t. I stopped believing that healing had to come from one place.
I started listening more closely to my body, to my nervous system, and to people who had travelled through illnesses completely different from mine and somehow rebuilt parts of their lives. I read stories of people living through cancer, traumatic brain injury, ALS and other life-changing conditions. These illnesses were not Long Covid, and I never believed that one person’s recovery could simply be copied onto another. But those stories gave me something important at a time when so much of the message around me was about everything my body could no longer do. They reminded me that the story of a human body is not always finished when somebody thinks it is.
That changed something in me. I read Radical Remission by Dr Kelly Turner and became fascinated by the similarities she had found in people who experienced unexpected recoveries from cancer. Medical treatment was part of many of their stories, but their lives also contained changes involving food, emotions, purpose, relationships, spirituality and the way they lived. I wasn’t looking for a formula. I was looking for possibility.
Dr Daniel Amen’s work also made me look differently at my brain. At the time, that mattered enormously. My memory had changed, concentrating was difficult, words disappeared, and information could enter my brain and seemingly vanish again. When your mind has always been one of the strongest parts of you, losing access to it is frightening. The idea that the brain can change and adapt gave me something I desperately needed: hope.
From there, I kept exploring. I learned from people and organisations as different as Medical Medium, Kris Carr, Tony Robbins, Mindvalley, the Satvic Movement, Jay Shetty and Jim Kwik. Some were doctors, some were researchers, some were teachers, and some came from spiritual traditions or the much broader and sometimes controversial world of holistic health.
I did not believe everything I heard. I still don’t. That was never the point. I became curious. I started asking what happened if I changed the way I ate, if I meditated, if I stopped forcing my body through exhaustion, or if I treated my nervous system as something that needed safety rather than discipline. I also began to ask a more difficult question: what happens if, instead of constantly fighting the body that appears to have betrayed me, I start listening to it?
Even experimenting was difficult. People talk about lifestyle changes as though you simply wake up on Monday morning and decide to transform your life. Try doing that when taking a shower can be the activity of the day. Try reading a book when your brain cannot remember the previous page. Try learning something new when your body hurts, your nervous system is overwhelmed and you have only a fraction of the energy you once had.
My changes were rarely dramatic. They were small: a meditation, a different meal, a few pages of a book, a workshop watched from bed, resting before my body forced me to. Sometimes I tried something and stopped. Sometimes I returned to it later. Progress was not a straight line, and neither was learning.
Jay Shetty brought something into my recovery that I had not realised I was missing: community. Meditation and workshops were not simply techniques. They connected me with people who were interested in reflection, growth and living differently. Jim Kwik’s Limitless and his workshops helped me look at my struggling brain with curiosity rather than only fear.
Slowly, all these seemingly unrelated threads began weaving themselves together. There was never one answer to Long Covid, and there still isn’t one answer for me.
That matters, because I am not writing these pages from the other side of a miraculous recovery. Long Covid still shapes what my body can do. There are still days when very little is possible, and there are still choices other people make without thinking that require calculations from me. Can I walk that far? Can I tolerate that noise? If I do this today, what will it cost me tomorrow?
But something has healed. My relationship with my body has changed. My understanding of what matters has changed. My willingness to listen has changed. Perhaps most importantly, I no longer believe that a meaningful life can only begin again when my old life returns.
For years, recovery meant getting back to the woman I had been. The woman who could work endlessly, travel without calculating every step, remember everything, care for everyone and keep going long after her body whispered stop. I wanted her back.
Now I am not so sure I do. Healing, for me, has not been a journey backwards. It has been learning how to live forward, with less energy, more awareness, fewer automatic yeses and more conscious choices. My life is smaller in some ways, yet strangely it has also become deeper and more meaningful.
What follows is therefore not a prescription for recovering from Long Covid. It is simply the path I walked, and am still walking. Take what resonates and question what doesn’t, because if these years have taught me anything, it is that nobody else can hear your body quite the way you can.