My body was in much better shape back in 2019.
I still rode a bike for a lot of my daily transportation around town; I had just released my fourth album, featuring probably the best song I’d ever written; and I was planning to do a couple of regional tours to promote the new release.
Then, as so many of us say, COVID happened.
Over the next four years, I would struggle with inactivity, Covid and then Long Covid, and the virtual shutdown of a musical arc that was about to blow up, leading to intensified depression. I went through different antidepressive drugs, changes to my diet, prayer and crying jags before finally coming out the other side in early 2023. But things did not get a whole lot better.
Gigs became much harder to come by and I spent a ton of energy hustling for nothing. My Long Covid symptoms lingered for months, hampering my ability not only to work, but sometimes just to get through the day. Finally, I got a formal diagnosis of ADHD, and that rocked my world hard.
(Funny side note: the diagnosis was actually handed down in a written wrap-up from a counselor I’d been seeing in 2018-19, but thanks to ADHD I missed that part of the wrap-up. Like maybe I saw it but I didn’t see it. Until 2023, when my doctor asked for a copy and that diagnosis, which had been sitting on the page the entire time, finally registered in my brain. I’d laugh if it weren’t so pathetic.)
So just when I think I might be on the way back to something resembling even a part-time music career, my hands start hurting whenever I play. And won’t stop. I took Tylenol, rubbed balm on my hands nightly, and nothing resolved. I worked through my one big summer tour with my hands hurting every day, came home after ten days and collapsed, totally exhausted. It took me a week to regain energy after that tour. And my hands kept getting incrementally worse.
Between all these things and the ADHD diagnosis finally sinking in, I found myself a few weeks ago just reeling from all the changes, and their potential implications.
And now the medical roller coaster begins: getting referrals and setting up appointments for deeper examination of all these things, trying to figure out how to treat them, and wondering if I’m reaching the end of my body’s physical usefulness in professional settings.
I’ll be 61 in less than three months.
And I am exhausted.
So yesterday, I began the process of looking into filing for disability. Between Crohn’s, IBS, depression, ADHD and my hand issues, plus my age, it’s not like I’d qualify for a subsidized retraining program at this point. I’ve worked with my hands my whole life, and don't have 21st century job skills. So I have to at least explore the possibility.
I don’t know where it will take me, if it will be successful or not, or what it will mean emotionally once I really begin processing it all. I am still reeling from the ADHD diagnosis and waiting to get an appointment with a mental health counselor for that. But the fact is that I am wiped out. I have carried so much since Covid began, and have been unable to heal from all of it, and I am sad and tired most of the time now. So I figured I needed to at least look and see if it’s time to consider filing.
I wish I could play guitar without my hands hurting after ten minutes.
I wish I had the body I had before Covid.
I wish we had enough money for me to consider these things without a sense of urgency or stress.
But this is the life I’m living, and I have to walk through these doors and see what’s behind them.
Here I go.
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