You Cannot Spiritually Bypass the Flu

A short essay about getting sick and losing my sense of safety and sanity

You cannot spiritually bypass the flu, and I certainly tried to.
I am writing this from the other side of eleven days of being sick with the flu. I do still have a cough that elicits stares, but I have a brain that works again, and I’ll take it.

I feel like Tony Robbins now. I want to go on a speaking tour about how I overcame this illness. I want a headset mic. I want a stage. I need an audience. I want to tell people that being sick is deeply emotional, that time becomes endless, that you start bargaining with God and TikTok at the same time. I want to tell them that the flu is not just physical. It is existential. And then I want to walk off stage and cough and have people say, “Poor girl.”

So welcome to my TED Talk. I will be talking about recovering from this flu forever. There is BF (before the flu) and AF (after the flu).

I was really sick for eight days, and during Hanukkah, each day grew brighter as I somehow got sicker. Now, some of you are thinking this is not a big deal, and you would be correct. But you would also be rude, because it was a really big deal to me.

But again, I’m from California, and I’ve barely even had a cold. I’m not like these East Coasters who grew up with the kind of colds you take antibiotics for. I’ve never even taken an antibiotic. This isn’t bragging. This is context. Every symptom felt like a mental threat to my sanity. I found myself texting my group chat constantly for sympathy for each new symptom. It was all so new to me.

TikTok said this was Influenza A.
ChatGPT said it was the common cold.
My doctor on Zoom said, “Here, take some Tamiflu.”

My doctor also didn’t seem to know about Xofluza like tik tok did, and so I probably need a new doctor. But it’s something I’d seen online that East Coasters were apparently rushing pharmacies for like it was Black Friday. I was past the 48-hour symptom window, so Tamiflu wouldn’t work, my doctor said. Another friend swore Tamiflu gave her suicidal thoughts, and I was already on the edge. I could not take on dark thoughts. Don’t quote me on the suicidal thoughts. I’m not a doctor and barely a good patient.

But something happened to me by day two or three. I fully turned into someone with a bad personality, which is devastating, because my personality is something I pride myself on. I texted like someone you already want to get out of a conversation with. I wasn’t interesting or interested. I couldn’t watch, read, or listen to anything. And rest is not fun when it is required. It’s offensive.

It’s also important to know when you have a bad personality. If you think you aren’t capable of having a bad personality, that’s a problem. You have a problem. It happens to the best of us.

I decided I was going to win this flu.

This involved a trip to CVS, where I asked an employee to unlock the cold medicine (so undignified), had my ID scanned to purchase Sudafed, and purchased a Neti pot for the first time. I was not messing around. I was sort of shocked the pharmacist didn’t offer comfort or curiosity about my raging illness, but that’s a side effect of the bad personality disorder. You think you deserve curiosity when you really just deserve courtesy.

I also fell straight into TikTok Remedy Culture. The algorithm, generous and unhinged, offered me boiled pears from Chinese medicine experts and mothers. Raw garlic. So many versions of raw garlic. Eating raw onions for immunity and punishment. Gargling salt water. Soaking your feet in salt water. Steam, but not too much steam. Sauna yes. Sauna no. Zinc, but never on an empty stomach unless you want to spiral harder. And a viral drink called a “flu bomb” by Barbara O’Neill, which involved ginger, garlic, lemon, honey, and fear. No idea who this woman is, but here is her viral recipe:

Barbara O’Neill’s Flu Bomb Recipe

Ingredients:
1 large clove of fresh garlic, crushed or minced
A 1-inch knob of fresh ginger, peeled and grated or sliced
Juice of 1 whole lemon
1 tablespoon of raw organic honey
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 to 2 cups of hot water

At one point I stopped and thought: if this were 1800, I would already be dead. Dramatic much?

Here are a few other things I learned:

Tea is so boring. Like, so fucking boring. Hot water. Pathetic.
Honey is wasted on the sick. I can never look at honey again.
Children get this too, which is humbling.
“Feed a flu, starve a cold” is something people say, and no one actually knows if it’s true.
No one has any idea what they’re doing, and certainly not online.

Breathing is a gift for calmness and for life. Which I wish I knew how to do.
Xanax is a miracle drug.

This too shall pass. I guess?
You are safe and can be trusted.
You will laugh again (mostly at yourself.)
You will feel better (my chat promised me this).
This will eventually feel like a blur, but it will leave a huge lesson behind.

I let people take care of me.
I trusted myself to take care of me.

I grew up this week. THE FLU IS MY NEW HOFFMAN RETREAT. You want to go away for seven days and work on yourself, or do you want the flu? ASK YOURSELF THIS NEXT FLU SEASON.

And smack in the middle of all this, I developed anxiety. A fun new symptom. A really cute way to lose your mind. I’ll use the buzzword and call it a nervous system issue. It was one too many cold medicines, not enough food, and one ill-advised attempt to have coffee that took me over the edge.

I basically had my first flu and my first anxiety attack at the same time.

Anxiety is sacred? OK, I’ll listen.

What unsettled me most wasn’t the symptoms. It was the loss of trust. Every cough felt meaningful. Every sensation felt like data. My body, which I usually experience as a quiet assistant, had become a suspect. I just want you to close your eyes and imagine having never been sick before, then imagine experiencing it for the first time, and apologize to me in your mind for whatever you’ve been thinking so far.

I suddenly had empathy eyes for every sick person I’ve ever silently judged. I thought every cold and every sniffle was a reflection of someone’s lack of discipline. I now understand why people spiral over mild illness. Spiral away, sweetie. I’m here for you now. When your body stops behaving predictably, your brain fills the gap with stories. Dark ones. Loud ones. And worse, really boring ones. I am so bored of myself and now subjecting you to this boredom.

I was super grateful for friends who let me spiral. Truly. I needed to say the same fear out loud over and over until it lost its power. I needed people who didn’t rush me or fix me or tell me to calm down and also promise me this would make me feel skinny. “You are one flu away from your goal weight.”

The things that helped weren’t the remedies. They were the people. My group chat.

Being teased helped.

One constantly sick east coast friend roasted me for reacting to this flu like it was the plague. My goddaughter cried laughing at me and said, “Fifi, it’s just a cough don’t be ridiculous.” That helped too. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t just a cough to me, but that felt way too intense. She’s ten.

When my other best friend, Lolo, texted me that she had the same thing on a family vacation and was hysterically crying, I felt less insane. I wasn’t alone in it. I wasn’t uniquely weak. We were both being flu babies and we couldn’t bypass this part.

At one really low point my Rabbi and Rebbetzin were hosting me for Shabbat, and I was panicked and convinced I needed to go to the ER. Sick people can be quite convincing. I felt like the first person in the world to ever be sick. Instead of judging me, they looked at me and said, “We are here with you, and we will go wherever you need to go.”

That calmed my system immediately. ( I didn’t go to the ER and I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to either but my MIND didn’t know that.)

Somewhere around then, I realized I wasn’t actually looking for remedies. I was looking for witnesses.

TikTok wasn’t healing me. It was saying: other people have been here.
ChatGPT wasn’t just diagnosing me. It was calmly repeating, in different tones: you’re still inside the range of normal.

I don’t say this for pity. Maybe a little. Pity feels good sometimes. We should welcome pity more, but that’s another essay. Mostly, I say it because being sick is depressing, and feeling better is a blessing.

At my lowest, I was texting things like: Am I going to be okay?

I knew I was really down bad when I didn’t even care that I’d lost weight. And I knew I was feeling better when I suddenly felt ready to GLP-1 again. I’m back, baby.

My inner child was fully activated, and she fully grew up this week.

I’m fully acting like a survivor of the flu and hopefully my personality comes back this week, I missed her.

I survived. I’m hungry. I’m vain again.
We’re so back.