On Post-Illness Recovery | No Letter Next Month
March/April 2025: A letter for people who need to pause.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
Leaving out unnecessary details: I had what people call a “stomach bug” earlier this month, and it’s not fun. Between physical discomfort, lots of bathroom time, disrupted sleep, insufficient nutrition, little to no caffeine, and a battle to stay hydrated, I found myself useless for days.
I treated my to-do list like it didn’t exist, letting tasks automatically roll over to the next day, and the next, and the next, in the software I use. I managed to do a few necessary things, and deleted some other tasks entirely. This Substack letter rolled over. I had hoped to write a good poem for March; I could barely string words together to talk to people.
For a lot of us, sickness is a stark, often necessary, reminder of the reality that we get to contribute to the world, but without us, God is still the One in charge. Sometimes, the most productive thing I can do for anyone is rest.
I did spend part of an afternoon lying on the couch and looking up all the viruses and bacteria that might have been waging war in my intestines. Mostly, I wanted to understand how to recover quickly.
The way people talk about these things, I figured I’d suffer for a few days and then be fine within another day or so. Apparently, recovery can take weeks, depending on what hit me. It takes time to rebuild the gut flora and reintroduce the foods my body didn’t want while sick. Some people develop chronic symptoms that might not go away for a long time.
I felt physically weak and cognitively slow, unable to focus enough to write or edit. It’s not surprising, really, as my sleep and nutrition habits were in tatters. Besides that, they say our gut microbiome affects cognition directly, in ways I do not understand.
Overall, it took several days, maybe a week, of working to rebuild my health before I started to feel like myself again: trying to get enough sleep every day, keeping caffeine fairly minimal, slowly working back up to exercising, getting outside when the weather was good, reading as much as my brain and time permitted, trying to get protein, trying to eat a variety of plants to get the kind of fiber that can help heal the gut.
Early in this process, a friend of mine, knowing that recovery can be more than purely physical, suggested I try a “creative stretch”, just any little artistic activity to help me ease back into thinking creatively. I did a little watercolor painting, took a few photos with an instant camera, and started a sourdough loaf, among other little tasks. It did help.
Paying this much attention to my own body has not been easy, and I’m not as consistent as I think I should be, but I appear to be doing better.
I’m grateful I have the resources (including time and information) to be intentional about healing. I don’t often hear people talk about the recovery part of ordinary illness—like how we often hear about migraines, but not the postdrome, or “migraine hangover”, that comes the next day. If you’re not actively sick, you’d better be back to a normal workload immediately. Right?
May we all learn how to recover well, and to graciously create time for ourselves and others after something happens—illness, trauma, grief, life change.
I hope my little illness causes me to grow in perseverance, resilience, caring for my day-to-day health, and gentleness toward others.
Lots of “bugs” went around this winter. Let this be a reminder to be gentle to people who have been sick recently, and if that person was you, to take care of yourself.
No Letter Next Month!
Between late letters in February and March, the ongoing need to focus on healing, and some extra busyness heading into April, I’ve decided to take a little break like I did late last summer. I plan to return to these in May, and I intend to come back with something worth waiting for.
If you’re feeling disappointed, thank you for enjoying these! I suggest checking out the archive of Letters from Rae Botsford End and finding a letter you haven’t read before (especially if you are a new subscriber), or a letter you remember enjoying in the past:
https://raebotsfordend.substack.com/archive
We May Have Changed the Clocks, but You Can’t Change My Circadian Rhythm
The start of daylight saving time didn’t help my sleep. Indianapolis is already too far west for the eastern time zone to be comfortable, and when we “spring forward” for DST, the light becomes about two hours wrong instead of one. My internal clock laughs at the external ones. Eventually I adjust, because our schedules run into other people’s, but it doesn’t make sense for anyone to “spring forward” at all.
As far as I understand the existing research I have seen on the subject, permanent standard time is better. DST is actually harmful. For more detailed information, see this article by neurologist Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse: “Daylight saving time and early school start times cost billions in lost productivity and health care expenses”, The Conversation, 7 March 2025.
She writes, “Smarter sleep policies—such as permanent standard time and later school start times—can boost efficiency, improve health and save lives.”
The rest of the article goes into detail about why. She says, “Unlike daylight saving time, standard time follows the body’s natural circadian rhythm, which is primarily regulated by exposure to sunlight. Our internal clocks are most stable when morning light exposure occurs early in the day, signaling the body to wake up and regulate key biological functions such as hormone production, alertness and metabolism. In contrast, daylight saving time artificially extends evening light, delaying the body’s release of melatonin and making it harder to fall asleep at a biologically appropriate time.
“Studies have found that adopting permanent standard time could prevent up to 5,000 suicides annually by reducing seasonal depression, decrease errors, injuries and absenteeism in the workplace and make roads safer, potentially preventing 1,300 traffic deaths each year.”
For reasons that I cannot begin to understand, Congress and states keep trying to make DST permanent instead of standard time. This is an incorrect approach.
I don’t exactly wake with the dawn in any time zone; it’s the evening light I notice. Our midsummer sunsets are well after 9 p.m., and visible twilight lasts until nearly 10 p.m. Part of the reality is that we don’t belong on eastern time, but DST makes it tangibly worse.
On Saint Patrick
Dr. James Emery White, pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, has a beautiful write-up about St. Patrick and why his day is worth noting each year.
He re-posts it annually, and I wanted to share this year’s link with y’all: “May We All be Irish”, Church & Culture, 17 March 2025.
Writing Updates
Besides my paid editing work and a very small effort at poetry, I’ve done a little bit of non-writing tasks for my novel (thinking, imagining, questioning, sketching concepts, researching). And I got this letter written.
Little Updates
Currently reading: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It’s my first time through it, and I like it, so far!
Next email scheduled for: May, ideally the second week
That’s it for this March! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
These Letters are 100% organic human writing—no AI involved.
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