For Better, For Worse

March – October 2020

This year has been a blur, but at the same time has seemingly dragged on forever. Normalcy feels like a lifetime ago. There is so much I could say about it all – how Ireland has dealt with covid, being in lockdown for nearly two months, going into lockdown again for another six weeks just five months after the first time, how close-knit our group of our amazing neighbours have become, not being able to see family and friends (both near and far), what it’s like working from home for months on end, etc – and perhaps at some point I’ll go back and do so, but I’ve hardly had the mental space to write for the last several months so these are just the main occurrences that have shaped my 2020.

I know everyone says that this year has been insane, for the most part due to the pandemic, which in turn has deeply permeated all parts of life, whether we like it or not. That said, I honestly don’t know if everything in the last several months happened partially as byproducts of covid, or if it’s all simply a coincidence that they occurred all at once.

The last week of February, when covid had only just arrived to Ireland (or so they said – we now know it was present much earlier), I started getting headaches. This was not unusual because since I started college I would get occasional tension headaches from stress, and they were less frequent after graduating but would crop up perhaps once a month when things at work work got a bit intense, but worst case I would take a single dose ibuprofen and be on my way. Long story short, that week was the beginning of months of GP visits, blood tests, an MRI, and chronic headaches with increasing severity and frequency – nearly every day at its peak – whose symptoms and characteristic fell somewhere between a tension headache and a migraine. Thankfully we started working from home full time in mid-March anyway, because at its worst I was only able to work half time – for six weeks in the end – because my brain and my body simply couldn’t function enough to handle more than that. After much experimentation of everyday adjustments, varying dosages of prescribed medication, and balancing the benefits and the side effects, seven months later I am doing much better thankfully. The catch, however, is that it’s unclear as to whether the headaches will cease or even decrease, if ever. After six months on the medication – so in January – it’s recommended that I stop taking it for a period to see if the headaches have diminished to a tolerable level. If they haven’t then they will likely recommend being on medication permanently. The catch, however, is that the medication is not one that I would want to continue taking indefinitely. There are other options but that would also require more experimenting and side effects and whatnot. It has kept me stable in the medium term, but only time will tell the best possible course of action.

The most important, and yet at the same time nearly irrelevant, detail is that the official diagnosis given was “post-viral chronic tension headaches,” which is a vague term for “the virus that caused it all is gone but the headaches aren’t and we don’t know why.” I asked how I could’ve had a virus without knowing – seeing as the headaches and fatigue were my only symptoms and my asthma usually causes me to hack up a lung with even the mildest winter cold – and my GP simply said, “it happens all the time.” My flatmate had gotten sick the week after my headaches began – flu-like symptoms for a week – but the HSE had refused to test either of us for covid simply because we hadn’t been out of the country in the last 14 days. In the months since, as we’ve learned more of the possible long-term effects of covid, there have been cases where people have had a very similar post-viral symptoms after having covid. One woman had what was described as a “bilateral frontotemporal, pulsating headache that was aggravated with mild physical activity” whose pain was “continuous and severe for 7 days and even as other symptoms eased, the intensity of her headache worsened.” This, along with the severe fatigue, describes my experience down to the letter. As I said, coincidence or direct result? I don’t think I’ll ever know.

As this silent struggle was continuing in the background, at work in the couple weeks before the office closed in mid-March because of covid, I was grappling with the decision of whether or not to report recurring incidences of sexual harassment in the workplace. I say it was a decision because, even though incidences should always be reported and I was fully aware of that, there were still many factors to consider. Primarily, if I said anything, I would be endangering the reputation and employment of a colleague who is also a good friend. This is due to the fact that, in a small office, there was realistically zero chance of retaining any sort of anonymity. I had to face the possibility that, even if I didn’t end up fired, speaking up could potentially cause ongoing backlash from several senior colleagues – and when I only work with 9 other people, that meant a third of them could try to make my life hell if they really wanted to.

However, my friend/colleague with his own job on the line was the one who encouraged me to say something. He didn’t pressure me or go ahead with it himself; he simply reassured me that whatever happened he would support me and back me up as a witness if it came to it. With that fortification, the turning point was realising that it was never only about me. There were two other female engineers, a part-time female college intern with another one scheduled for the summer, and countless other women – architects, clients, quantity surveyors, etc. – with whom we worked on a daily basis, plus any other woman who walks in the door in the years to come. At the end of the day, it was about making sure this didn’t happen again, to me or to anyone.

In one sense, working exclusively from home in the months following was a blessing (thanks covid), because there had been days I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as some of my colleagues. It gave me time to cool off, mentally process, collect my thoughts, and figure out how I was going to handle the situation. Thankfully my boss, an odd but kind-hearted man in his 60s, was deeply understanding and frankly appalled that such things had happened in the office at all, apologising on behalf of everyone and assuring me that he would do everything in his power to ensure it does not happen again. And although it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing from there and efforts to address the issue have been greatly encumbered due to stresses and delays from covid, I can see strides have been taken heading in the right direction.

As covid, headaches, and work tensions were brewing away over the course of months, in February when things were still “normal,” I was at a Catholic young adult community event and I had the rather unfortunate fate of crossing paths with a posh ginger architect and we started dating shortly after. And again, in a way I’m incredibly thankful for covid because a crisis will bring out either the best or the worst in people. Unfortunately, but also quite fortunately, it brought out the worst in him. By the time we got to week 6 of what turned out to be a 7-week lockdown, ending in early May, he had proven that he was simply a verbally abusive, immature, manipulative prick. I’m not usually one to have any tolerance for bullshit anyway, but especially not at a time when so many other things were causing enough difficulties.

It was only when I sought the input of people I trust that I realised just how many friends, family, colleagues and neighbours have been in toxic relationships such as this. The more people I spoke with about it, the more I realised that I was only a few months in – saved from wading any deeper thanks to covid – but many had continued on for months, years, to the point of getting engaged and breaking it off, to being 15 years married with 3 kids and in the middle of a very messy divorce. Quite frankly, it was alarming, but also eye-opening. I’ve always known that these women (and men) are incredibly strong and intelligent it is in no way their fault that they got stuck in that situation, but I had always wondered how one would get to that point before realising the seriousness. Now I understand. I cut and run at the first red flag, but it had taken an extreme situation – a pandemic – to reveal the appalling behaviour from an otherwise outwardly seemingly lovely and sane person. I was also lucky enough to have such supportive people surrounding me on all sides to talk things over with, bounce ideas off of, gauge reactions, vent to, get second and third opinions from, and serve as examples to follow. I don’t know where I would be without them.

The first week of June – my birthday – we were only in Phase 1 of reopening (so practically lockdown still), I was on the second week of fighting the side effects from the medication for the headaches while still working only part time, and all hell seemed to be breaking loose in the US in the wake of the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and unfortunately many protests ended up resulting in violence. It didn’t seem at all like a time for celebration. That was a difficult week. The most I could do to celebrate was bake myself a birthday cake, my flatmate made dinner, and we invited our neighbours – a couple and their one-year-old – over for mojitos, chicken piccata, and spiced pear cake. The only reason we even made the exception to have people in our apartment was because my flatmate was already caring for the toddler each afternoon since both parents were working full time from home and were struggling without childcare.

At the end of June I was still optimistic that I would be able to return to Florida at the end of July for a few weeks to see my family and attend my friend’s wedding – a friend who’s been a brother to me since we were kids – even though the Chile leg of the trip to see my dad’s family had already been cancelled months before. Within a week, Florida’s rate of covid cases had skyrocketed so drastically that my parents told me – as I already knew but didn’t really want to accept – that it simply wasn’t safe.

Ongoing over the summer months, while Ireland was slowly beginning to return to some semblance of normalcy, I was still trying to strike a balance between dealing with the headaches and dealing with the side effects from the medication, and continuing to grapple with feeling betrayed and extremely disappointed by colleagues whom I had trusted and even admired. All the while, the election season in the US was running rampant and the Democratic presidential nominees were dwindling in a direction I had hoped not to see, with violence continuing to ripple across the country.

Instead of heading to Florida, I watched my friend’s wedding from my couch, thankfully with the moral support of my friend/colleague who had insisted on coming over to watch it with me, even though I had originally insisted that this was entirely unnecessary. A few weeks later I took two weeks off from work, just to have a breather, and it happened that those same two weeks my parents ended up spending in isolation. My mom, a physical therapist, contracted the virus from her work, also unknowingly passing it on to my dad before she started showing symptoms. She had volunteered to work on the covid ward and had only been there a few days, but it’s most likely she contracted it beforehand, from patients who were not in the covid ward but later tested positive. My dad had a mild case and although my mom was quite sick for a few weeks and they both had a slow recovery, thankfully they’re doing better now.

Even though most of these struggles are ongoing, in the midst of it all I realised that there was one other thing that was just as constant as the issues themselves. When I say “thing,” I mean person. And when I say “in the midst,” I mean after the many months it took me to finally catch on. This constant happens to be a tall ginger lad who didn’t talk to me the first three weeks I started working at the company, who for a year and a half sat on the other side of the office not saying much, who for the last year ate lunch with me nearly every day listening to each others’ rants about work and life, and who since February – when everything started to feel like it was imploding – has been there for me unceasingly. This is the aforementioned friend/colleague who supported me through the difficulties at work, who got me a hurley for my birthday because it seemed like I needed something cathartic, who had the foresight to know I’d need someone with me as I laughed and cried through my friend’s livestream wedding, who called me nearly every day during the seven-week lockdown to make sure I was ok, who offered to go after my ex with a hurl (which I appreciated but declined), who would walk with me for hours simply talking and passing a sliotar back and forth because there wasn’t much else we were allowed to do over the summer, who gave me countless pep talks about coping with a chronic condition and side effects of medications and dealing with doctors and what to expect with an MRI because he (unfortunately) has had firsthand experience with all of that, who has made me laugh on the hardest days, who never put me down for feeling overwhelmed by my struggles, no matter how small – even though he knows better than most what it is to struggle physically, mentally, and emotionally – but rather has been supportive, thoughtful, kind, humorous, steadfast, patient, understanding, and utterly selfless since day one.

It’s a long story – two years in the making – but I’m fully aware that if even one thing had happened differently this year, we might never have ended up together. Everyone – family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, friends across the ocean, literally everyone – saw it coming “from a million miles away,” and in hindsight I’m still somewhat baffled at how completely oblivious I was. But in all honesty, I don’t think it could’ve worked any other way. In fact, despite the fact that it was so obvious to everyone else for months, the two of us were only two weeks apart in our copping on – our minds finally catching up to our hearts.

In each difficult situation I can see how it shaped us, brought out different parts of each of us, and redirected us each time. Honestly, so many of the difficult bits this year seemed senselessly painful in the moment, or simply a waste of time, but in hindsight I see what God was doing. His timing isn’t always the way I want it to be, but it is perfect. So as Ireland enters into its second lockdown this year, starting tonight, I know it won’t be easy, but I also know that God will not let this time go to waste. I will not understand in the moment, and it’s even entirely possible that I will not understand ever, but either way, as with any challenge, it will shape us and direct us, for better or for worse – the choice is ours.