When the Fog Lifts

“I could feel the fog lifting, and with it came a sadness for all the time I had been gone from myself.”
— Maggie Nelson

For months, I’ve been questioning myself: my memory, my energy, my motivation, even my worth. I’ve walked around in a haze, unsure whether the dullness in my mind or the heaviness in my body was depression, burnout, aging, or something far more insidious. I blamed myself, as so many of us do in medicine. We’re trained to override discomfort, to perform even when we’re depleted, to keep going until collapse forces rest.

But this week, something changed. My mind feels clearer. My thoughts are connecting again. That persistent, rattling cough, the one that had become a soundtrack to my days, is finally drying up and with it, something more profound is beginning to lift.

I realize now: it was Covid brain fog. Lingering, low-grade, invisible. A thief who stole clarity and left shame in its place.

I kept showing up to work, coughing, struggling to concentrate, moving slower than I once did, and no one said a word. Not “Are you okay?” Not “Could this be something more?” I was perceived as difficult, slow, and possibly even lazy. Not once did anyone ask if I might still be healing.

That’s what brings the anger. Not just at the virus, but at the silence. At the way the system, and the people within it, failed to notice what I now know in my bones:
I was sick.

It is a strange relief to name it. A burden lifted. Because it wasn’t just me, it wasn’t that I was too old, too emotional, too fragile. I was recovering from a serious illness while trying to uphold a persona of capability, and no one around me saw past the mask.

But my body saw. It hacked, it coughed, it forgot names, facts, and the rhythms of a well-trained clinician. It kept asking for rest, and I kept pushing it away, until it quietly began to mend without permission.

Now that the fog is clearing, I’m reclaiming a kind of self-trust that had eroded. I no longer need to apologize for what I couldn’t name before, and I want others to hear this clearly:

If you’ve been exhausted, forgetful, or emotionally raw, it might not be you.
It might be your body still telling the truth, even when no one else can hear it.

We deserve better than a system that fails to ask the most human question: How are you really doing? We owe it to ourselves to listen more closely, especially when the world doesn’t. Compassion fatigue and moral injury are real. The fog is lifting, and with it comes the reckoning — and the healing.

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