What would you do if you got 12% better?

I just found out. (No gatekeeping. And no spoilers: 12% is a cosmic shift, kids.)

12% better is inconsequential if you’ve got a cold, or pink eye, or hemorrhoids. (Assuming on that last one, as I’ve lived life with at least this one blissful blessing.)

In ME/CFS-land (or related nations of Long Covid, Pentad Syndrome, MCAS, or craniocervical instability), 12% is a day pass out of Guantanamo.

12% is the second biggest upshift I’ve experienced in this entire multi-decade shitshow.

First, no gatekeeping: I owe pretty much all 12% to the sprinkle of KPV peptide I’ve been tapping under my tongue a few times a day. Here’s where I learned about it. Since someone will ask, my other big upshift (years ago) was ceasing probiotics. Turns out, I was histamine-ing myself into blitzed-out brain fog on the daily.

At 12%, the difference in my symptoms is small: a slightly less awful headache. A day shaved off payback. A microbump in energy. An extra cloud cleared from my always partly cloudy brain.

The difference in my life is huge.

Why? Butterfly effects.

Bumping into an old colleague, I felt well enough to have a short conversation that wound up shifting the entire course of my top project, ratcheting up the work and my value on it 300%. (I totally made that number up, but you get the gist.)

I’ve had just enough extra juice to make it to an ongoing writing group—a half dozen new friends and a rusty restart on a needed practice.

I’ve added an extra 90-minute worksesh to my week, which means more opportunities, more money, more business growth. (On a very small scale, but STILL.)

When an old friend reached out, instead of putting her in my carefully paced, woefully behind Friend of the Week rotation, I just…spontaneously went for tea. It still crashed me for a day after, but damn: the decadence of being a person in the world. Casually whatevering, frivolously giggling. Friending as a verb instead of a concept. Our chat lifted me straight up.

Most of all, though, this 12% grace makes me realize what I miss most:

Agency.

I’ve been sick for so long, I don’t remember health. Or even the half-health I had for years. I wince when I see people jogging or licking ice cream cones, forgetting that it doesn’t hurt them. My experience is so baked into my bones at this point it’s impossible to really believe not everyone else is having it.

And so, I start to think my microscopic life is some sort of moral failing. On a logical level, I know my mitochondria are compromised. My ligaments are toast. But the soundtrack in my brain is, just motivate. Can’t you do better? What if you tried harder? Look at you wasting your life away.

Turns out, when the brakes let up even a skosh, I take every mile I can get.

Turns out, I’m not lazy, shitty, or effete. There is no moral failing.
Turns out, there’s what the illness demands. Which is a lot.
And then there’s what I demand, when the illness is a little less demanding.

Agency. Even 12% better, I can’t say yes to a lunch invite, a snack, or a beer. I can’t just throw in an extra trip down my building stairs all willy-nilly. I can’t drive out of town without a multi-day rest plan.

But I can take the scenic route home from the grocery store today, Big Sky clouds tempestuously dramatizing classical radio on factory-grade speakers.

As foggy fingers wrap around the low-lying hills and creep close over mountains in every direction, I negotiate a little extra time in a narrow sunbreak over Bozeman. I want to hike those hills, so damn desperately. But I’ll take this Sunday drive. I’ll take anything close, anything in the real world, anything not on a screen.

I don’t really need a shower, I bargain, flying past the turn I should have taken.

I won’t ask that cute guy to watch the first ten minutes of a movie with me, I barter, speeding over the hill towards a clearer view. (Sidenote: isn’t it his job to ask me? The clouds answer by stepping up their spectacle.)

I’ll clean my desk another day, I cave, unable to resist a downtown grand finale cruise under the glorious roof overhead. Every jostle in the road punishes me, but with my 12% armor, I bet it’ll just be a worse headache, not a full-blown migraine.

The sunbeams keep cracking somehow through a sky crammed with clouds. Improbably, I’m escorted home in a patched-together ray of unlikely sunshine.

12%. It isn’t much, and it’s been everything lately.
Mostly, I’m relieved to learn that all of me is still in here, somewhere.
With new parts, grown in captivity.

I’m so grateful. And so greedy for more.