I can’t write for long but I have a good reason — I finally have some good news.

For about a year now, I’ve been having language lessons online with different teachers in Chile, shopping around for someone who can make new things grow in my brain. I’ve never actually been on that long flight to the other side of the world and then down, down, down. I have a Chilean parent who doesn’t speak Spanish, and I have this surname to catch up to, so I’ve always wanted to go, and to learn. I did it through school. I used to translate songs after homework for fun. I would read fairytales in Spanish. Keep my diary unlocked because I was writing all my secrets in another language anyway. God, my brain was a whole forest back then.

But just before we had our final exams, I overheard my teacher consoling another student. He was telling her that we all have our strengths. Gabrielle, he said, is good at writing and reading but not as good when it comes to listening and to speaking. He was right. But I was good at taking things to heart as well, and I became too scared to speak another language without the full dress rehearsal of a school setting. I still had art and art was less exact, like a language you got to decide for yourself. So instead, I went to university for that.

I suppose you have to get used to feeling scared when it comes to language learning. Memorising thousands of words, learning to braid them with your tongue in patterns you might never get used to. But I’m not really scared anymore. Some of it is age and being 30 now. Most of it is because I’ve been sick for four years and the only fear I really take seriously anymore is getting even sicker. So last April, I started taking Spanish lessons online with a Chilean teacher like it was the most normal thing in the world. Unbuttoning a school collar that isn’t even there.

When we log on, he always asks how I am and I always say I’m tired. Estoy cansada. That got repetitive quickly, and then I learnt something sweeter — to say that tengo sueño, as if in my tiredness I am simply too full of dreams. When my sentences got longer after a few months of me rebooting what I used to know, I pocketed new vocab I had no need for when I was 18. I started talking about muscle cramps, blood pressure, tachycardia, dizziness. The Castilian word I knew for doctor’s appointment isn’t used in Chilean Spanish, where’s it’s hora, not cita. Long Covid is Covid persistente and I thought, yeah, that sounds about right; I also thought it was good that I could probably — albeit slowly — survive intake if I ended up in a hospital over there, not that I had plans to go. Covid has indeed persisted.

I obviously wish Covid hadn’t got to me before I got to Chile but memorising words and getting used to braiding them has brought me far more than I expected. It’s brought me someone who can detail class politics, slang, food. Someone to tell me who my favourite football team should be. Someone to describe the town next to the volcano where my granddad was born, and to explain that a baby in Chile is called a guagua, pronounced wawa, like a baby crying (or someone taking the piss out of one). My teacher fills me in on scandals in the news, and normally bitches about the Global North, but only after I tell him I’m tired in increasingly articulate ways.

Or that’s how it was until this week, when he asked me how I was doing and I got to tell him ‘finalmente, estoy bien.’ Listen, I’m not fixed. Every day, I am my own bomb disposal unit practising which wires to cut. But I started a new medication two weeks ago and now the explosions are few and far between. And it’s just been so long since I had good news for anyone that I have been doing the rounds telling family and friends and my neighbour and the woman who runs the shop round the corner and the man in Chile who teaches me swear words and now it’s your turn to hear it.

When a person stands up, their blood sinks with gravity so the body reacts to make sure that blood gets back up to the head. If there’s not enough blood in your head, you feel a thousand problems at once and then faint. A healthy body sorts this out by having blood vessels constrict and gets the heart beating a bit faster for a moment to squeeze it back up. But Covid made it so my nervous system couldn’t pull this trick off anymore, and it meant that every time I moved, I was racing against a clock threatening to pull me down to the floor. My heart would overreact and I’d be headless, nauseous, hot, in pain, and all those words I learnt in Spanish from before.

But I am writing this two weeks into Midodrine, a medicine that constricts my blood vessels for me so my body doesn’t even have a chance to overreact and — fucking hell. I know it’s only been two weeks and things might level off or regress and I could get Covid again and die and I will have jinxed myself for telling friends and family and my neighbour and the woman who runs the shop round the corner and the man in Chile who teaches me swear words and you. But my cousin asked me last night if I felt like a new person, and I said no, I feel like my old self. I was only 25 when I got sick back when there were trees inside my head. I feel more like her because I can sort of think, and I can move a bit, and I spoke more Spanish in my last class than I’ve ever done, and I can’t hear the fucking countdown anymore. I haven’t had a headache since I started taking it. I haven’t dreaded a knock at the door.

Midodrine ups blood pressure, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve got the dosage right just now. It’s like I have traded my body for an inflatable replica; I often feel so full now that I can’t actually sit down. How do you say balloon in Spanish? Standing up for more than a few minutes feels like I am performing a miracle, so you can imagine how I felt realising I was going to need to plug my standing desk in for the first time since I got it. I am standing writing this now. It’s why I cannot write for too long. Like I said, it’s been four years. I need to get used to being upright again; my feet are hurting like they did when I first started doing shifts in restaurants as a teenager. Another reason to feel young again. Another reason I need to be careful not to rush in whatever time-travel direction my body is headed, in case I do too much and the bombs go off.

So no galleries yet, no flights or theme parks either. While I find my feet again, I am still home-based, reading and knitting and sustaining myself with culture at home. So this week I took part in an online workshop. Programmed at ORT gallery by Resting Up Collective and led by artist Phoebe Kaniewska, it was called ‘Crip Resistance: Creating Identity Charms.’ It cost £6.13 to register, but everyone got an envelope in the post with thick A4 sheets of gold and silver foil, various tools, a pen, a pencil, different coloured ribbons and some paper. I don’t normally sign up for things like this but I have a sick friend in Leicester and I just keep wishing we were in the same place, so I sent her the link for us to do it together; while I build my strength to go back into the world, Leicester might as well be as far away as Latin America.

At the beginning of the workshop, Kaniewska told us about the history of charms. She shared her screen to show us medieval trinkets, and spoke about the religious pilgrim badges people would (and still do) receive at the end of their journeys. The artist said she had been thinking about the pilgrimages we go on as sick and disabled people, while I thought about my four years of hospital trips. She said something about the medals we could be getting for making it to those appointments, those horas. She left me thinking about the missed recognition the sick don’t receive, and what I would accept as recognition now after everything that’s gone on. It’s hard to quantify it. It’s hard to celebrate survival when you just want to live.

Kaniewska invited us to think about imagery that might be symbolic to our experiences, the idea being we would be taught how to make our own charm by embossing or engraving foil with the tools we’d been given. We could hang a charm with ribbon, or make a mobile of many different ones. I couldn’t bear to make anything that represented this sickness so far; the shape of a pill, my heart, salt, water, all the pillows I’ve killed. But it was a fateful time to be making a physical token of my identity, because I don’t know if I am still full of tired dreams; if I’m 18, 25 or 30; someone who suits their own name or not. I can feel myself stretching upwards. How do you say silver birch in Spanish?

I thought about how Chile has always been an abstract thing in my mind. Just the outline of a country. There are all the details my teacher is giving me, but it’s still like reading an entry in an encyclopaedia, or learning facts about a musician you’re a fan of. In the workshop, I thought about how I want to go on a pilgrimage I’ve chosen for myself, not a hospital-one my body has chosen for me. And so, I searched for the outline of Chile on Google Images and held my paper up to the screen so that I could trace it. Every elbow of the coast, and all the skirts the Andes wears. The way it tapers down and to right like a hook; like the cane I sometimes had to lean on when I felt myself about to fall.

After I was done embossing the foil, my friend sent me a picture of a medieval dragon she had finished complete with scales and a background of starbursts. It looked like something you would buy in a high-end artisan shop. Mine wasn’t great! But that was fine. Quality didn’t run through my mind the entire time — everything else I’ve written about did. The workshop became an hour to think about who I might be becoming. An hour to think about the different objects that should be placed in a circle if my spirit ever needed summoning. An hour to do something with my friend. An hour to realise I probably would not have found the courage to return to Spanish if I hadn’t gotten sick in the first place. An hour to dream about a pilgrimage to the airport, to the volcano, to those lakes, that ice, those people. An hour to make a magic charm that might help me get there in the end.

— If you’re here at the end of the text, please post a celebratory emoji on The White Pube instagram

— You can buy our book Poor Artists in bookshops. You can read it in libraries. Hardback, audiobook and ebook available – paperback coming in october

— If you want to give us a regular £1 a month, please sign up here