In late spring of this year, I was diagnosed with myositis – a rare muscle and connective tissue disorder which causes muscle weakness, widespread pain, and fatigue. Daily activities became difficult to carry out, and many a morning was spent weeping while my mother helped pull back my duvet when I was too weak to do it alone, or while my father dutifully tied my shoelaces for work. 

I will have this condition for the rest of my life.

I have been signed off for eight weeks, of which I have completed roughly four at the time of writing, and there’s no real guarantee that I will be capable of returning to my usual work in the hospitality industry (in which I have worked for all of my adult life) at all, rendering the skills which I have accumulated over the past ten years almost entirely useless.

In some ways, this recovery time has been something akin to the profound hopelessness of the coronavirus lockdowns. I feel as though I’m of no use to anyone. I can’t do much besides sit around the house, completing easy chores to earn my keep despite the insistence that I rest and recuperate from the sizable quantity of medication in my system that manages the pain and exhaustion. I can’t bring in money to contribute to the increasingly expensive weekly shopping, or the incrementally rising tide of bills. I feel purposeless. 

But I have realised in this strange liminality that when there is nothing, I can find everything.

Chronic illness is a lonely and isolating ordeal, and so I have made it my mission during my recovery post-diagnosis to explore the things I had always made excuses not to do because I was too busy, too tired, and unmotivated.

On Saturday, I baked banana bread for the first time, off my own steam. I found two sad little bananas in the wicker fruit basket, blackened and limp, and I wondered if I would be capable of making something out of them. It may sound absurd, but in this time of crippling self-doubt and crisis for my own future, mashing up a few bananas, eggs, flour and sugar seemed a terrifying concept. What if I added the wrong ingredients? What if I overbaked it? Underbaked it? Dropped the bowl while mixing, sending a fluffy splatter of mixture across the kitchen, unable to clean it from my aching muscles? What if it was all a waste of time and ingredients?

Do it for the bananas, I thought. They deserve to be a tasty loaf. And so, I did. Under the intermittent watch of my mother, I mixed the ingredients and put them into a lined tin and put everything in a preheated oven, and crouched by the door, gingerly peeling aside the handtowel hanging from the handle to observe my creation’s progress.

What if the chocolate buttons on top burn? Pick them off then, Mum said. It’s rising too much already. When it’s nearly done we can turn the oven down, that’ll help, Mum said.

I waited for that banana bread for an hour or so, my frail self-esteem hanging in the balance. I can’t work, I can’t go too far from the house, I need to take my meds, I hope that the doctor thinks I can go back to work soon, I need to schedule blood tests and a bone density scan, when will the disability payments come through…

Mum went inside from our sunny perch in the garden for water, and she called to me that the loaf was done.

We took it out of the oven and there it was. No burned chocolate buttons, no crispy spilled mix down the sides of the tin. A simple thing, sitting in a little tin cooling on a rack.

It was, for all the world, a perfectly formed wee banana bread.

We waited impatiently for it to cool, and sliced it in thick chunks to eat with coffee. It turns out that I had mixed the ingredients to the ideal point of fluffiness, mostly by very happy accident. The outside was slightly crisp, the inside was still warm and the chocolate buttons were gooey, and it was delicious.

Spending a few hours measuring, mixing, baking and waiting has done something to my frustrated psyche that I hadn’t quite expected. Something which my mother can do, and her own mother was very adept at, and seemed part of showing love in the most gentle and understated way came with the realisation that to achieve something with a tangible (and tasty) outcome was the love and patience which I desperately needed to show myself.