Strong, Fearless and in Love with Life After Long Covid
As a therapist, Angela Lawrence supported clients through mental health crises but she never thought she’d experience one herself. After what started as a mild case of COVID-19, the Canadian woman suffered paranoia, panic attacks and a sense of doom so great, she thought she was dying. On several occasions, Angela had to be hospitalized for fear she'd harm herself.
“I felt like I was completely unraveling,” Angela Lawrence says. “Besides anxiety and my kind of intense personality, I was a pretty joyful person. I had no point of reference for any of this. I remember being in the ER and they had to separate me from the people who were waiting because I couldn’t stop crying and howling. I didn’t feel I was remotely myself in any way.”
Before COVID-19 struck in January 2022, Angela appeared to have an idyllic life. She was raising two children, working as a counselor and taking five high intensity exercise classes a week. Although her infection was mild—her family playfully took selfies with their Covid tests—Angela’s energy didn’t rebound afterwards. Over the next five months, she pushed through fatigue and a string of emotional stressors.
Descent into Stillness
This facade came crashing down in May 2022. Along with her psychiatric symptoms, Angela developed tachycardia, headaches, brain fog, insomnia, POTS and extreme sensitivity to light and sound. She had to wear noise-canceling headphones to navigate the cacophony that life had become.
Although Angela had a master’s degree, she could no longer comprehend written words. Her blood pressure dropped so quickly when she rose, she learned to live horizontally. At her worst, her teenage daughter helped her to the bathroom.
“I’m not dying but I feel like I’m dying,” Angela recounts. “I can’t even think. All the forms from the Long Covid clinic, I couldn’t navigate them so my kids had to help me with those. Within a few days, the POTS came on, which put me down. I refused to be sick in my bed so we made a daybed in my front deck and a daybed on the back deck and that’s where I lived until the snow flew.”
Over the next four months, Angela was completely sedentary. This was a 180-degree turn from the person who would leave yoga class during the resting pose of savasana.
if angela wanted to get off her daybed, she crawled to the grass.
“It was actually quite beautiful because I got to be still for the first time in my life, like really still,” Angela says. “There were these spiders that would normally go around me but they just started to just go over me.”
Doctors checked her heart, brain and sleep pattern. Tests came back normal. A psychiatrist explained that she had post-COVID syndrome. While her symptoms were severe, there was no tissue damage to explain them. Later, a nurse confirmed the same surprising thing: her symptoms were 100% real but her body had a clean bill of health.
This was a turning point for Angela and her family who’d feared a psychiatric disorder or incurable disease. Instead, she realized that her brain and nervous system were on overdrive. Angela could do something about that: calm her mind and manage the fear.
She first found refuge in an on-line yoga and meditation community. Later, she took a brain retraining program, which helped her reframe fear-based thoughts. Before long, the determined patient had scheduled her whole day with healing practices. Timers buzzed morning, noon and night.
She started gaining a little energy but was anything but relaxed.
As autumn leaves turned to winter flurries, Angela was able to get out of her bed for light activities. But she felt at war with herself and the debilitating symptoms that persisted. She describes her brain as boiling and her skull like a helmet of concrete. She’d have tantrums about the dreaded head pressure, which she recalls being a 10 out of 10.
Seeking Surrender
Angela yearned to shift this adversarial relationship with her body. She sensed there were buried emotions that brain training couldn’t reach. Angela heard me speak about self-compassion and knew that she needed it. She signed up for my Be Your Own Medicine course and recalls being cracked open in the very first session.
“You said ‘you’re not broken. You’re okay. You can stop trying to fix yourself,’ Angela recalls. “Despite all these wonderful practices, I was telling my nervous system how broken it was. That was such a revelation. I had a couple days of solid tears. That’s how I know it was real. I couldn’t go back.”
It dawned on her like a lightning bolt in a storm. She was trying too hard. Even though she’d made progress, Angela realized that she was attempting to repair herself because she didn’t love herself. Long COVID was another thing to overcome in a desperate attempt to feel worthy. Angela ditched her rigorous rituals right there and then and tried something wholly new.
“You gave me permission to drop it all,” Angela says. “For someone who is chronically anxious, letting go is kind of like dying. You’re giving up control. I’d never done that with anything in my life, except maybe giving birth. I really felt that if I don’t get any better than I am today, I’m going to live a good life. I was absolutely clear about that. I had to accept everything that was happening.”
Angela says there was one person before her moment of surrender and another person afterwards.
They were two different people. She would soon excavate an authentic, wild and free spirit underneath the illusion of control. But the part of her that was holding on for dear life didn’t let go without a fight.
Watch my YouTube interview with Angela on her Long Covid recovery.
Stepping into Pain
At this point, Angela felt she’d crawled back into life. When she took more than 4,000 steps, her head hurt so intensely, she had to lie down. She was no longer fighting the sensations. But she longed to hike and run and swim!
The Canadian woman got an opportunity to house sit at her mother-in-law’s “hippy hobbit mansion” on 90 acres of wilderness near a beautiful river in the Cariboo Mountains. She left her family at home, and there was no cell reception.
Angela reserved the week for her and her nervous system. Instead of trying to get rid of symptoms, she respected them as messengers. Angela brought her favorite course meditations and writing exercises to assist her.
"I’m going to figure out what’s behind this intense head pressure that’s so debilitating,” Angela told herself at the time. “It doesn’t have to go away but I want to understand it. It was just me and your recording of somatic tracking. I'm going to really dive into this somatic tracking, self-compassion and increasing my activity level. I'm doing it!"
Over the next six days, Angela started hiking, running and cold water swimming, all the things on her “get my life back” list.
Sure as day, her brain and body pushed back! But Angela knew she was safe. Like a fierce mama bear, she stood strong in herself as sensations and emotions reared up. She watched them with courage, breathing and tapping into the feelings.
Angela also used journaling to mine unconscious material. She wrote her three lists of stressors from my Expressive Writing handout and let her emotions spill onto the page. This brought bursts of rage and other emotions. Angela had previously been frozen around early wounds. But in this safe space, releases came out in primal screams.
“On the third day it changed to migraine level, 12 out of 10, pain,” Angela recounts. “When that happened, I laughed. I thought ‘I know what’s going on here. You’re not going to get me! I’m safe.’ I would exercise. And I’d do joyful things. I felt like I was in an altered space. I was me and my nervous system and nature and spirit or whatever. On the fifth day, I remember sitting there with my head in hands and saying “Oh Rebecca, this better work!”
Angela was seriously doubting her experiment, but she also felt emboldened. She remembered Nick’s dramatic recovery story and just kept following her inner compass. Angela knew something was buried beneath the pain and she was determined to excavate it. She cried, wept, yelled and kept walking through that river valley.
On the sixth day, after finishing an angry writing dialogue, something extraordinary happened.
“It’s sounding biblical but I’d just finished a very big cry of grief from a memory,” Angela recalls. “And, it just went away! It stopped and went from a 12 pain and pressure to a two. My head cleared. It felt surreal because I’d had this for a long time. I walked out into the garden and things were clear. Colors were bright. I curled on the grass and cried and then laughed and then cried and laughed.”
She lay there totally clear-headed as if looking at the world for the first time. The green grass, the bright flowers, the blue sky. Everything was pulsing with aliveness, including her body.
Angela Lawerence hiking in British Columbia after her Long Covid recovery.
Learning to Love
Angela felt that even if her symptoms returned, it didn’t matter. She understood them as pleas for attention. In the days to come, pain that had hovered near a 10 for months was now somewhere between a zero and a two. When pain emerged, Angela kept hugging herself and breathing. No matter what residual symptoms appeared, she knew she was done with long Covid.
No matter what residual symptoms appeared, she knew she was done with long Covid.
Angela wrote to me after her wilderness week with an infectious case of bliss, “I am now sort of in love with myself! Like, what grit! I can't stop smiling and today on my 8 km hike (doing this every day!), I was caught dancing on the trail by some other hikers. LOL! They were like "Wow, you look happy!” I AMMMMMM!!!!!”
Angela tapped into something even greater than a physical recovery. She admits that it’s a relief to live without mind-numbing symptoms. And yet, in a strange way, she even misses them!
“I have a funny, weird relationship to those symptoms now,” Angela says. “I’m kind of missing them. It’s a weird thing to say. I just began to love them. I know that sounds so strange Rebecca but I began to love them. In loving them, I started loving me.”
At the heart of it, Angela realized that all she wanted was love and she found it through her healing journey. She now knows in her bones that love is all there is. From this vantage, there’s no desire to reject any part of herself or her experience—not even pain.
Angela in her backyard ice bath in British Columbia.
It’s been two years since Angela came down with a mild case of COVID-19. She’s since overcome a second infection with relative ease through her mind-body practices. She’s back to work as a therapist with newfound tools and compassion for her clients.
Angela still loves her healing rituals: starting the day with an cold plunge in her outdoor tub, Wim Hof Method breathing, yoga or qigong. She’s upped her cardio with a new spin bike and long nature hikes. Angela continues somatic tracking and emotions-based meditations in the evenings, along with restorative yoga.
Instead of watching snowflakes drop, she’s snowshoeing!
She sees long Covid as a before and after life event. It taught her to hold her pain and uncover her joy. When she realized her brain was trying to keep her safe, she stopped seeing her body as an enemy. That opened space for curiosity. It’s not that all the conditions of her body and life are perfect. But she’s found freedom and beauty within the imperfection.
“It doesn’t matter how I wake up, I can hold it,” Angela says. “I don’t think you can do that without being your best friend. Inside of myself, I have a cheerleader. I have a deep love. I am so profoundly proud of myself for this whole experience and the kind of grit that’s required by all of us who have chronic illnesses. I am absolutely amazed at the person I am becoming. I would never have known that she was in there, incredibly strong and fearless.”
Want to learn more about Angela’s experience in Be Your Own Medicine?
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