Matt Alton introduces our new project Long Covid Stories, opening a window onto his life with Long Covid in the hope that you will share your story too. Matt will be conducting interviews and writing up stories from our community to share through our newsletter and website. His poetry and social research has been published widely and he posts on Instagram: @mattaltonpoet. If you’d like to share your experience with the LCS community and beyond we’d love to hear from you, initially by filling in the Google Form linked here. We only have capacity to tell a handful of stories, so we’ll select to represent a variety of experiences: mild to severe illness; a diverse range of ages, genders, sexualities and ethnicities; people from all around the UK. We’ll conduct an interview in a format accessible to the participant and write up an aspect of their story for the LCS newsletter and blog.
When the Covid-19 pandemic sent us into lockdown in March 2020, I had been writing creatively for less than a year. I had discovered poetry by accident and, in a burst of energy, had sprung out of myself into the spoken word scene, attending every open mic I could get my un-self-conscious metaphors on. Everybody lost something distinct to them that year; for me it was the physical spaces and friendships that were nurturing my development as a poet.
I have never been a writer who does not have a chronic illness (I developed fibromyalgia 13 years ago when I’d just finished my A-levels) and the majority of my writing has happened in a post-Covid world and body. When I first had a mild Covid infection in March 2022, I had been recovering from a period of deep, stress-related fatigue; it was like the virus stamped my fingers off the ladder I had been climbing. The second time was similar, with Covid spitting in my face for good measure.
I can sometimes forget that Long Covid has a lot to do with the current state of my health – rather than giving me new symptoms, my existing pain and fatigue were ramped up to levels I wouldn’t have recognised before the pandemic, as I rushed around as a teaching assistant or sea swam through winter. For the past three years I’ve been using a mobility scooter. It gives me great freedom, but navigating pavements, public transport and shops where accessibility is an afterthought is exhausting – as if I wasn’t fatigued enough already. Managing other people’s reactions to me as visibly disabled adds another layer of difficulty to the outside world. Then there are the people who refuse to see beyond my healthy exterior and assume I’m using my scooter for the kicks – 'there's nothing wrong with him' mutters the drunk man on the bus.
The poet Louise Glück says that 'writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.' While I've never got back to performing regularly, I have developed a subtler writing craft, that takes more time to shape and less energy to disseminate. In the months following my second Covid infection I rarely left my bed, but this time produced some of my best poems exploring illness and isolation. This year, I've been taking circumstance by the horns by writing about my application for Personal Independence Payment, making sure I retain some control over my own story.
As well as writing creatively, I’m a social researcher. Long Covid often gets represented by statistics, but I’m interested in the stories of people living with the illness; how they live day-to-day, how their goals and perspective on life change with illness, how they engage with the benefits and medical systems. In this new project, Long Covid Stories, we’ll show through profiles of people living with Long Covid that the illness affects a broad range of people in a multitude of ways.