When Another Year Ends and Your Body Is Still Here

This week is heavier than it looks.

For many people living with Long COVID, the end of the year isn’t just a calendar marker; it’s a reckoning.

Another year has passed. Another January is coming.
And your body is still here, still careful, still managing, still not back to the life you imagined you’d be living by now.

That can bring an unbearable kind of grief.

You may find yourself thinking:

“I’ve been sick for another whole year.”
“How am I still here?”
“What if this is as good as it gets?”

If those thoughts are showing up, you’re not wrong. This moment hurts because it matters.

The Grief of Time That Didn’t Move the Way You Needed

Chronic illness doesn’t just take energy; it distorts time.

Life keeps moving: seasons change, people make plans, milestones arrive, while your body feels like it’s negotiating every step. December can sharpen that contrast in painful ways.

You end up grieving momentum you never built.
Assumptions.
The sense that effort leads somewhere predictable.

And that grief deserves to be named and seen and raged at; not reframed or wrapped in forced optimism.

But whether it’s Long COVID or any of the other unbearable things life can throw at us, some years are just not about progress. They’re about enduring conditions you didn’t choose.

What This Year Was Actually Doing

And the truth is, even if this year feels like it disappeared into illness, it wasn’t. It was spent inside systems work — most of it invisible.

Your nervous system was learning what it could tolerate.
Your body was testing boundaries, pulling back when it had to, protecting you in ways that don’t look productive from the outside.

That kind of learning doesn’t show up on calendars or resumes, but it changes the terrain inside you.

An Optional Exercise For the Year-End Review

If you’re tempted to do a year-end reflection and it feels unbearable, you don’t have to. You can absolutely leave this milestone unmarked.

But if it helps to orient without judging yourself, try one of these gentler questions instead of “What did I accomplish?”

• What does my body know now that it didn’t know last January?

• Where did I stop forcing something that used to cost me more than I realized?

• What limits became clearer this year, even if I didn’t want them to?

• What signals do I recognize sooner now?

There is no requirement to find a “silver lining.”

If none of these land, that’s okay too.

Some years are about surviving long enough for the next chapter to be possible.

A Small, Honest Light

What has changed — quietly — is our understanding.

We know more now about post-viral illness, nervous system dysregulation, and why bodies can get stuck in prolonged survival states. We’re no longer guessing in the dark the way we were a few years ago.

The map is getting clearer, even if the pace is still slow.

That doesn’t erase the grief of time lost.
But it does mean your body hasn’t been failing.
It’s been responding to real conditions with real intelligence.

If This Week Feels Heavy

If the end of the year brings sadness, fear, or anger about how long this has lasted, I’m sorry. It’s brutal. Invisible illness takes so much from us.

But while on the one hand, you’re still here, on the other – you’re still here.
Your system hasn’t stopped trying.
And nothing about this moment disqualifies you from what comes next.

Sometimes, the most honest way to end a year is simply to acknowledge how hard it was to live it.

That is enough.