Chronically Over It

new chronic health flare + other life updates

I’ve been trying to find the words to start this post for too long now, and all of them feel futile and silly in the current state of the world.

Sorry, I dropped off for a couple of months. I’ve been barely keeping my head above water for two years straight, and it all finally caught up to me.

is probably the best way to summarize it.

Outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, photo by Somer Love

Since August, I have been dealing with significant new health issues that have often left me bedridden and struggling to do even my basic care needs throughout the day.

In early August, I was on my way to the Heart of It Writing Retreat when I started to feel a sinus infection coming on. I felt too exhausted to travel and worried I could be contagious, so I decided to cancel my retreat and stay home. The sinus infection lasted for weeks and I was also dealing with muscle weakness and fatigue like I have never felt before. I saw my primary care doctor and urgent care providers several times, all to hear the same thing: it’s a chronic sinus infection, and they suck. I ended up spending most of August in bed, sleeping for most of the day.

In September, I began a new job with a new nanny family. The sinus infection returned, and I was miserable and exhausted for most of the month.

In October, after getting my flu and COVID-19 vaccine, I ended up in the emergency room the next morning. I woke up feeling achy and exhausted, which is a typical response for my body with any vaccine. However, by the time I took my dog outside and came back inside, I was sweating profusely and started to black out. I live alone, so I texted my upstairs neighbor to come downstairs. Before my neighbor could make it downstairs, I was lying on the kitchen floor, losing consciousness while on the phone with 911, trying several times to get the words of my address out to the operator before succeeding.

My neighbor waited with me until the ambulance came. By the time they did, I was sitting upright again, but still extremely weak and struggling to hold conversations. They ran several tests and deemed me stable, but wanted to bring me into the hospital. As an independent contractor, I am horrifically underinsured and already drowning in medical debt, so I refused the ambulance but had my friend take me into the ER instead, where I was immediately faced head-on with the fact that I live in a red state. As I was experiencing presyncope in their waiting room, nurses misgendered me and taunted me about how this is why they don’t recommend the COVID vaccine. (To be clear, I do not at all believe the COVID or flu vaccine was to blame for what happened to me. I believe it triggered something else that had already been going on for months prior. The nurses, however, couldn’t and wouldn’t shut up about it.)

Somer the day before the health flare and then the follow up ER visit the next day.

I was bedridden for a full week after this incident, having to take more unpaid time off from work. For weeks, I felt dizzy and weak in my limbs. I was waking up with heart palpitations and chest pain so severe that I barely slept. Tasks that I used to be able to do without a second thought, like standing long enough to cook myself dinner, became next to impossible.

After a few weeks, most symptoms subsided, but the fatigue persisted. I went from being someone who worked out 4-5 times a week, taking hour-long dance classes and lifting heavy weights, to barely making it through a 15-minute gentle yoga video or a walk around the block with my dog.

Through November and December, I had nonstop colds from working with young kids, and every time it was the same thing. I would have the same symptoms as before: dizziness, presyncope, muscle weakness, heart palpitations, and chest pain. I started each day by lying on my couch with my feet up while chugging water and electrolytes. I would pray to goddess while driving to work that I wouldn’t pass out at the wheel.

Flash forward to more unpaid time off, more doctor visits I can’t afford, so many blood tests, and I still don’t have an official diagnosis.

Somer while sick at home during the fall and winter months

Thankfully, I do have a badass circle of disabled friends and a community that listened to me and shared resources throughout the journey. Thankfully, I have a supportive primary care doctor who did not dismiss me when I suggested long COVID. I have had COVID twice, once in 2022 and once in 2023, both times causing me to be severely ill and experience presyncope. After the second time I contracted COVID, I was sure I was experiencing long COVID symptoms and talked about it with several friends who have long COVID. However, I was also actively going through a divorce and figured no one was going to believe my fatigue, anxiety, and brain fog had anything to do with anything else.

After ruling out numerous other conditions, we are now looking most closely at POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome). The next step in getting a diagnosis is a 28-day heart monitor, which at this point, I cannot afford to do.

I had to miss several more days of work over the last few months, which eventually led to a reduction in my overall hours. I am now underemployed, underinsured, and so fucking tired. I have been hardcore on the job hunt (which, as we all know, is fun in the current market), hoping to find something that is a better fit for my body and that has health benefits so I can start working towards healing.

I have been struggling financially since leaving my marriage and my previous career, but the last 6 months have been a constant fight to stay afloat. I have been surviving off the generosity of my family, chosen family, and community—as well as numerous side hustles and selling off my things.

On top of my own personal health emergency, it seems like everyone I know is facing some emergent situation right now. I’ve been trying to balance being emotional support for those I love, community care, and tending to my own health. It feels weird to complain about anything I’m going through in the current world we live in. That’s partially why it’s taken me so long to write this post. I don’t know how to say I’m struggling when so many others are dealing with so much worse. But I’ve been at my breaking point for a while now, and I realized something has to give. So I decided to take the winter off from social media and writing.

When life gets extra crunchy like this, I can immediately feel myself reaching for my favorite crutch, the internet. And when my personal life feels like a daily fight to stay grounded, that’s the last place I need to go.

I also wrote my ass off last year. In 2024, I had a vision for a book come to me, and like with anything I do, I couldn’t help but go all in. I filled notebooks full of poetry, spent countless hours on my laptop editing, and took as many workshops as I could find.

I’m realizing now that this health flare might be a nudge toward a new practice I want to adopt: taking the winter off. I’ve been imagining my creative practice as a pregnancy: 9 months of the year I’m creating life; 3 months of the year I rest.

Somer’s poetry journals from 2025

So that’s what I’m doing, I’m resting. I’m taking the winter off socials and off Substack. During that time, I’m going to re-evaluate how I want to show up on this platform. It no longer feels realistic for me to create at the same pace I was before.

I have decided to pause my Monthly Astro Forecasts indefinitely. That was a practice I deeply loved writing and hope to return to one day, but for now, my focus has to be on stabilizing my health and finances. For astrology updates, I recommend Collapse Astrology, Chani, or Astrology for Writers.

I’ll be curious to see where I land with my relationship to social media. I know I don’t like who I become when I spend excessive amounts of time on there. I can feel my focus and creativity diminish. But the truth is, I also love social media. Especially Instagram and YouTube, as problematic as they both can be, they are two platforms that I grew up on and built community through. It’s funny, since going offline, I have felt hits of inspiration for video content again. I am feeling nudges to return to a craft I love, but this time, on my own terms.

My year for the word is intentional. The relationships I invest in, the way I spend my money, and how I spend my free time, let it all be intentional. And maybe that’s where I’ll land with social media as well, using this year to create a more intentional relationship with platforms that are nuanced and complicated but also sites of community building and creation.

Any relationship I form this year will prioritize my own health and needs over the pressure to produce and perform. I am all about slow living, slow producing, slow consuming, savoring everything that I do. The content ideas that have started to bubble up in my brain are videos that would take months to create. It feels like a tiny protest against the fast-paced trend culture I was once a part of.

But for now, I am going analog. I am going to cozy up until spring with my long list of books to be read. I am going to collage, and read poetry that reminds me of who I want to be as a writer when I return. I’m going to let myself be bored and see what comes of it.

I’ll see y’all in the spring. <3

all my love,

somer