Grateful for Sickness; Grateful for Health

For the first time in three years, I finally fell sick. Not the headache-for-a-day kind of sick, but proper sickness, where my body feels weak and my head feels feverish. And strangely, I’d haven’t felt this relaxed in a while.

I have been working 7 days a week for months on end now. On weekdays, I’m a full-time intern at a software company. On weeknights, I’m occupied with CCA matters and tuition prep. On weekends, I tutor students. Every day, I am running around getting work done and speaking to people. Even when I don’t have any meetings to attend or tasks pegged to other stakeholders, I feel pressured to learn something or do something worthwhile with my free time. There isn’t a full day where I have time to myself to breathe, consolidate my thoughts, and just rest.

Being sick changed this. Strangely, while I feel a sharp, itchy pain in my throat, the rest of my body feels calmer and more at ease than it had been in weeks. There was no rush of hormones, adrenaline or cortisol gushing through my veins. My mind wasn’t filled with a million and one post-its of things I had to do next after the current task at hand. I could just rest. For the first time in a long time, I could just be.

I used to think that falling sick was a bug. In fact, the very phrase “caught the bug” exemplifies this. But this experience made me realise that falling sick was a feature of my existence. It reassured me that my immune system was working as it should (I had this strange belief that it wasn’t fully working because I hadn’t fallen sick at all during the entire COVID-19 pandemic). In fact, it was a reminder — for me to dedicate some time each day or week to slow down, catch my breathe, be, and learn how to rest.