I have spent twenty years in the air.
Ever since a life-altering accident in May 2006, I have lived in deep, relentless denial. I treated my body like a machine that needed to be forced to work, whatever resistance it showed. And in my spirit I lived in the treetops, high in an eyrie, feeling the thermals under my eagle wings. Of course I was an eagle; if you’re going to live in the sky, be an eagle. Up there, I felt out of reach, floating above the frightening reality of a physical frame that was in perpetual, unyielding pain. Being disembodied felt like the only way to survive.
I called it determination. I called it a work ethic as often as I called it a bastard thing. I threw myself into full days of outdoor events, community projects and freelancing; believing that the price, those days of excruciating pain and total collapse afterwards was worth paying. When your body is a site of physical limitation and chronic suffering, leaving it behind for the sky and refusing to have anything to do with yourself seems like a really good survival mechanism.
I know now it was denial. A long, exhausting, twenty-year-long denial. Only in the past week or so has that come to an end.
For a long time, framing my condition as chronic fatigue made that denial easy. It allowed me to treat it as tiredness, somethingI could overcome with a strong will and a defiance of the pain. But the reality of ME is that eventually the post-exertional malaise wins. This is not about mind over matter anymore. It isn’t a lack of resolve either The truth is that ME sets really tough boundaries. The debt is systemic and no amount of willpower or mind tricks can bargain with it.
Over the past few weeks, the thermals under my wings have dropped. The transition has not been easy, but it has brought the heavy realisation that I cannot keep paying for the flight with my health. The grief of setting those wings aside is real. I have decided that I do not have to destroy them. They saved my life when staying inside my physical form was too unbearable to endure. I have retired them, knowing they kept me alive until I was safe enough to land.
And as for now, I am choosing to take the country lane instead of attempting to live in the fast lane that is no longer safe for me. The country lane is quiet and unhurried. It is a place where rest and boundaries are not a defeat, but a gentle act of self-preservation.
This shift arrives alongside the changing season. These early days of August have been hot and breathless, drawing the life out of the garden, but within that heat is the very first whisper of autumn. I can feel her coming. I am entering my own autumn now, 60 next year and I am learning to live as autumn by letting go of the brightness of spring and summer, and settling into a slower, earthbound rhythm.
There is no shame in this; after all autumn carries the richest, most beautiful colours in her hair, and the country lane offers a quiet shelter where I can finally inhabit my actual life, grounded and at peace.
Josie Moon 