It’s been five weeks since I started taking midodrine and I can definitely still feel that I’m sick. It’s just that the noise is quieter now. Building work has moved onto the next street.

It’s a weird thing to celebrate. My body only passably worked for the past four years because of a fuck tonne of upkeep. The nervous system condition Covid left me with, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, begs for beta blockers, B12 injections, folic acid, and 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. I have 2 extra teaspoons of salt a day, copious electrolytes, 4 litres of water, and I suffer a low glycemic diet. No alcohol, no caffeine, no hot weather, and definitely no standing for very long. Only slow starts, wishes on shooting stars, and a lot of maddening, punitive rest. I am still having to do all that, but the new pill is stealing the show. I am finally upright, inflated, sharper, more ready to chat. I am feeling happy in a way that makes me think I haven’t been for a very long time.

In fact, I am feeling different enough that I caught myself speaking to a taxi driver the other day about my experience of Long Covid in the past tense. It was like pretending I didn’t recognise my best friend. Some roommate I lived with for years and grew to fucking hate. But the lies were only blatant to me. He didn’t know that I had recently started medication that meant I could practise standing up again like a baby — that I’d timed myself standing for longer and longer periods for an entire miracle of a week, keeping track on a calendar, new lottery numbers. The taxi driver didn’t know I’d then dragged the exercise bike out of the shed and spent the following week doing three slow, nervous minutes each day. I just looked perfectly normal in his rearview mirror while I pretended there was nothing at all behind me.

Yeah, I have been keeping these developments to myself the way people keep the date of their driving test secret in case they fail. Exercise intolerance and post-exertional malaise are symptoms of Long Covid that have sent my head west, done me the most damage, and left me in month-long crashes feeling a heaviness right down to my cells. So when the cardiologist that prescribed me midodrine said he wanted to see me strengthen my legs because that would help my heart along, I ignored that part of the conversation. I didn’t know then that taking the pills would have me standing and biking and lying to taxi drivers — that they would leave me craving more movement. I had felt heaviness down to my cells, to go past perfect; now midodrine was like two hands on my back pushing me into future tenses.

In week three of baby steps, I found a PDF online that detailed a physical rehabilitation programme developed by a hospital in Philadelphia for people with my condition. I got more excited than scared. I trawled Reddit and YouTube and read standalone blogs from people who’d done the same programme to see if I should be more scared than excited. If I went for it, I’d be following a five-day-a-week schedule of strength training and recumbent exercises for the next eight months. Day one would involve three minutes on a rowing machine, two minutes recovering, another three minutes on a rowing machine, and that’s all. Things would gradually increase from there. The purpose is for the sick person to go at a pace that feels easy, thereby gradually increase stamina and retraining the nervous system to react a bit more normally to movement.

It’s honestly all I thought about for days. I thought about how I had cancelled all work that would take me out of the house, pulled out of a book tour and hit pause on book two just to focus on my health. I thought about how reassuring it would feel to have eight months all planned out. I thought about all the gym subscriptions I’d ever had in different cities in what feels like another life. I thought about how I’d donated all my gym gear after I got sick because I never thought I’d go near one again. I thought about my kung fu trousers on a hanger in a charity shop. I thought about how I’d been running 5Ks every other day in the months before I got sick; and how, the day before I realised I had Covid symptoms, I only made it to 3 before my legs gave up. I thought about what it would feel like to go to a gym for eight minutes and then leave.

More than anything, I thought about all the people who were sick with energy limiting conditions before Covid entered the ring, and I remembered their warnings that soon enough us lot would be prescribed graded exercise. They made sure we knew about the PACE trial, a controversial study (partly funded by the Department for Work and Pensions) which compared the effectiveness of different treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome and then recommended CBT and graded exercise. A few years later, those recommendations were reversed after the study’s methodology was found to be flawed. It was agreed CBT is not ‘curative’ and graded exercise is ‘harmful’ — but only after much harm was done to people’s bodies, and to the public’s understanding of the illness which was now muddled with the idea people could simply exercise themselves better, and if they didn’t, they must be lazy.

The effect that Covid has on the body is so new and mysterious that I still don’t know if the fatigue I experience is the same as theirs, or if it’s something else entirely. I had erred on the side of caution until now, knowing that physical rehabilitation programmes exist for POTS but that I had felt too bad to even consider them. But I decided to meet my head and body halfway: I found a gym with no contract so I could bail after a month if I needed to. Old, carpeted, duct tape over cracks in the mirror, it was comfortable. There were only two people in the background lifting weights while the manager asked me what I was looking to do. He was the kind of person who didn’t look away when he spoke, so I didn’t tell him any lies. He told me he was going to look POTS up when he got home so he could keep an eye on me. Then, he looked right at me and said ‘well done for getting here,’ and it nearly made me cry.

But there was a problem right away. You know how day one should have lasted eight minutes? I can’t afford ten taxis a week so I have been doing a twenty minute walk to the gym and a twenty minute walk back, arriving with a hot heart. There was also day two when I thought, eight minutes here is no fun. I like being in this slightly dirty room. I like Manager Man. I like leaving the house every day. What if I start every session with the twenty minute stretching I used to do before kung fu? I like feeling like I’ve been put through a mantle! I like touching my head to my knees! I had a panic attack on day three because I was exhausted and I was scared about how tired I was going to become as the days went on. Hard to know how bad you’re supposed to feel if you haven’t moved much for four years with or without a janky nervous system. But the biggest problem was the fact I wasn’t even going easy on the rowing machine. I was making the numbers on the LCD monitor go higher and higher like I was trying to win an arcade machine. It is a wonder I am still here to tell the tale.

I guess I’d worried about so many other things in the run up to starting this that I hadn’t factored in my own personality. The reason my friends call me an imp. The reason my boyfriend knows to let me make my own mistakes because I only listen to myself. I’d had music blaring in headphones throughout that first week — after becoming a fan of Confidence Man during my sicker times, they were making so much more sense in the gym — but it meant I couldn’t hear the sheer state of my breathing. Here they are, my own mistakes. I decided to find an audiobook to replace the club music and hit play on the longest book on my wishlist in an attempt to take my time with this stuff; to smell the roses, all that sweat in the carpet. The book happened to be Monkey King, the latest translation of Wu Cheng’en’s 1580 masterpiece of Chinese fiction Journey to the West.

If you’re not familiar, it’s the story of a monkey born from an egg on a mountaintop, who wants to achieve immortality. He leaves his home on Flower-Fruit mountain and travels on foot for ten years to study under Subodhi, the Patriarch of the West. Subodhi, after much persuading, teaches him how to travel on clouds, transform himself into different things, and most importantly, he teaches Monkey the Way of Immortality he’s been dying for. However, once Monkey has these powers, he realises he can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants and demand whatever he wants. Chaos ensues. The Dragon King, the Jade Emperor, and all the authority figures across Heaven and Earth get tired of this kung fu-fighting Monkey’s antics. He starts calling himself the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, he eats the Queen Mother’s Immortal peaches, eventually becoming so powerful that it is Buddha who eventually pins Monkey under a mountain for 500 years to give everyone a break. And that’s just the opening.

The main body of the story is Monkey’s atonement. The deities agree that if Monkey escorts a Buddhist monk on foot all the way from China to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, then he can be free. They trick Monkey into wearing a golden hoop around his head that Tripitaka, the monk, can control. Two more atoning sidekicks Pigsy and Sandy join the gang and they go on to journey for fourteen years together. They just have to battle demons and get past a few calamities before they finish the job. I came to the story as a kid by way of the 1987 live-action Japanese TV show of Monkey. It was given English dubbing by the original cast in 2004 and broadcast on Channel 4. I would have been ten, watching it with my cousins on Saturday afternoons in Nan’s living room. I loved the story so much that when Chen Shi-Zheng and Damon Albarn made an opera of the story (for what I am now discovering was the inaugural performance) at Manchester International Festival in 2007, I convinced my Mum to take us.

I wonder if Monkey is the reason I ended up doing kung fu for a stint, and why I’m on the rowing machine wearing feiyu shoes — the only gym relic I kept. It’s funny to try and justify something you have liked since childhood, because I don’t remember what I was thinking at the time and maybe it doesn’t really matter. It could have something to do with good guys fighting baddies, and how I was never that charmed by superheroes who were obviously just men in fancy dress. Talking animals on the other hand — gods watching from the sky, religion confirmed, a Monkey that could pluck a hair off his head and magic it into anything, demons arriving on fragrant winds… all of that was easier to take seriously. It seemed so much closer to art? It seemed like true fantasy I guess because a Chinese story from the 16th Century was just so far from my own frame of reference.

More obviously, I was a very well behaved kid so I loved Monkey’s cheek. This 2021 translation by Julia Lovell squeezes the original 100 chapters down to about a quarter of the length. Critic Minjie Chen thought the translation was so good and playful that Lovell’s name should be on the front cover because she saw the translation as more like a work of collaboration. Monkey King has all the naughtiness that drew me to the story in the first place. Every page has a quip. Every time an authority figure tries to speak to Monkey, he answers back like a school kid-comedian. He leaves goblets full of piss when he’s asked for holy water. He pops down to Hell, asks to see the ledger that records everyone’s time of death, crosses his own name off the list, and then deletes all his mates’ names for fun while he’s there. I’m really glad I went with the audiobook because the performance by Kevin Shen is like listening to an entire anime series in the form of a one-man radio play, and it sounds like he was grinning in the booth the whole time.

And it’s probably already obvious but I’m so glad I chose this book for right now. It came back to me at just the right time. Reading it as an adult, I realised I’d only remembered the easy episodic pilgrimage itself and not the reason Monkey had to go on it in the first place. It’s a classic story of hubris — perfect listening for when you can’t stop pushing your luck. I caught one break with midodrine and thought I could go everywhere and do everything, like Monkey after he first became immortal. It’s comforting to know we’ve always been in need of moral, spiritual and fictional guidance, that there have always been characters at war with themselves; speeding away on static rowing machines, trying to outrun the gods.

I couldn’t imagine Monkey slowing down. There’s a chapter where he gets into an escalating contest with some corrupt monks. He has to pull off conjuring tricks, a rain-making test, and finally, meditate in the clouds. Monkey has no response for once and Pigsy asks what’s wrong. ‘It’s like this,’ explained Monkey. ‘Kicking Heaven to pieces, churning oceans, carrying mountains, chasing the moon, changing the course of stars and planets - these are all child’s play to me. You can cut off my head and chop it into pieces, split my stomach, and gouge out my heart — none of those unusual manipulations hold any dread for me. But please don’t ask me to sit still. Padlock me to an iron pillar and I’ll find a way to wriggle. I just can’t do it.’

I think we might be the same. But if we really, really need to, how do we sit still? How do I practise literally any form of restraint? Is it even possible to change your nature? Two things happened next to debate these questions for me. The first is that I went to the gym on a Sunday and saw a notice that it would be closed for the Bank Holiday. Without a second thought, I just did two days of my programme on the same day. I woke up barely able to move, fatigue returning like a slap, or a laugh. I cried because I thought I’d ruined everything but then the second thing happened: while I was panicking in bed all Monday, I let the rest of the audiobook play next to my head until the story was over.

Monkey could have cloud somersaulted all the way to India, grabbed the Buddhist scriptures, and couriered them back on his own. The point was for him to slow down, to travel with others, to face adversity, to persist, and ultimately to change because of the pilgrimage. In the last few encounters, Monkey goes out of his way to save a thousand children, and then a whole town. Not to spoil it, but it has been out since at least 10 years before Shakespeare dropped his first play: on the last page, Monkey asks if he can take the gold hoop off his head, the insurance Tripitaka placed in case he needed to use the controlling spell. The monk tells him it isn’t even there anymore. Monkey can control himself.

Maybe the next 8 months will take me far longer, or I’ll have to quit, tend to my body, and these years will never become a past-thing I tell taxi drivers about. I don’t know. But today, when I went to row, I didn’t play any music and the audiobook was done, so I went on it alone to better hear my breathing. I learnt after a few pulls that the rowing machine makes its own noise — that my movement makes the fan at the other end breathe. The gym is old, so the sound coming out of the machine was rough, like somebody wheezing through a metal grate. The sound made me want to slow down, and I imagined placing a gold hoop on my own head. I thought about things other than my health beginning to change.

🐒

— if you’re here at the end of the text, please comment a MONKEY emoji on our instagram or share it with a monkey wherever you hang out online

— the CHOP protocol programme I’m doing

— the PACE trial reversal

— Minjie Chen’s review in the LA Review of Books

I have had this song in my head for 20 years:

And the first 10 minutes of the audiobook are on youtube if you’re interested! god i am a FAN aren’t I