Since a damning day in September of my twenty-second year, I have been dizzy. I don’t mean the type of dizziness that occurs when stepping off a rollercoaster; that’s a slight buzzing sensation that turns you around and trips you up just briefly. I encounter vertigo that makes me feel like I’ve been thrown in with clothes on the washing machine’s heavy cycle, being tossed around like a limp sock, becoming as weighed down as the dress I probably should’ve taken to the dry cleaners. Being dizzy, to me, is like this washing machine; it doesn’t let up easily, and when the spin cycle hits, I’m so wrung out and internally contorted that I look and feel completely unrecognizable when the spinning is over hours later. 

One night, while existing within the results of a positive COVID test, I had a dream where I found myself dizzy for the first time. I was spinning, like I was going at a full, unimaginable speed on the Alice in Wonderland teacups at Disneyland, and it felt so visceral. It turned out to actually be visceral.

I hadn’t ever experienced vertigo until that morning. I was startled, somehow untangling myself from my sheets and emerging from my bed onto all fours on the ground. The straightness of my spine and the forwardness of my head in this tabletop position only strained the dizziness, stoking the flames within the angry beast I’d soon learn vertigo to be. I reached for my phone to text my mom to come to my room, but the phone screen was being tossed around my line of vision as I struggled to ask my mom for help via text. Because I had COVID, my mom could only come to the hallway outside my door frame, a towel over her mouth as a makeshift mask. She stared at me sympathetically as I started to panic, thinking I was going to vomit. My mom gave me exercises she’d looked up to try, sure that the crystals in my ear needed to be reset (which is what a lot of people with vertigo spells need). We wouldn’t figure out that that would not be the solution for months. 

I Googled COVID and dizziness and found that there was a faint connection, but that it should probably let up when the virus did. That was not the case. 

I struggled to wake up and feel normal every morning for the next few months, well after my time with COVID was over. I myself was spinning, but the room was spinning sometimes, too. Dizziness felt thick, like viscous honey gradually pouring over me, slowing me down and warping my vision. It was as if the whole world tilted on its atlas, and I was trying to keep up with the slanting earth around me while walking in a line. Dizziness felt like I was ever unstable, always moving slightly even when still, usually tipping sideways one way or another. I felt like I was stuck on a bumpy boat ride on a choppy lake where the only option was to jump ship into waters that were worse than the rough boat ride itself. My dizziness was desolate, whirling me out of my mind then leaving me by myself as it sauntered away. It felt like that washing machine, but also like I was fully out of control of my body as I spun out and into oblivion…this “oblivion” usually involved me running into door frames at home and into walls at work. 

Physically, it felt as though I was detached from my body more than ever before, and like there was no way to reestablish that connection; no hope of finding the thing that had made me like this in the first place. Emotionally, it was devastating. I harbored a familiar feeling—the sense that I couldn’t trust my body. In life before vertigo, I dealt with things that caused issues in my brain; these issues seeped out from my brain into my body, making me physically sick often. In these experiences, both trauma-related and in the aftermath, I felt that my body was not a safe place. I felt as though it was not somewhere I liked to be, not even somewhere I was comfortable being. Vertigo only heightened this feeling of unmissable, internal danger, making me feel like I had nowhere to go to rid myself of this. 

In the coming weeks, I discovered that in order to function, I had to literally roll out of bed on my side and slowly sit up to make the dizziness subside from a night of tossing and turning. I couldn’t drive within the first hours of waking up, and soon my neighborhood walks were too difficult to venture out on, much to my dismay. On my walks, I’d fall onto the street from the sidewalk, hot asphalt pressed into my hands. I’d run into lamp posts, stunned. My entire balance system seemed to be off, and there was nothing I felt I could do right. I fought through school; looking up and down from the lecture to my notebook was enough to throw me back in the washing machine for the next hour. Work at the restaurant had the same effect. I’d walk sideways, taking steps on a slant when walking to seat guests; looking down at our reservation system would trigger such intense vertigo I couldn’t see everything without that familiar sloshing being present. 

Because I didn’t know how to prioritize my health, it took me six months to take the vertigo beast seriously, to take him to the doctor to be checked out and tamed. When I finally arrived at my ear, nose and throat specialist, my doctor was quick-witted and funny, but he really did listen to me. He had me lie on my back as he took my head in his hands and twisted it around to reset the crystals in my ear. He said my eyes were twitching slightly when he put me in a position that would make me dizzy, and then he stood up and clapped once in triumph when he felt he’d figured out what was wrong with me.

He diagnosed me with BPPV, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or “top shelf vertigo” as he called it. It’s a common cause of vertigo that is made worse by looking in certain directions, like casting your head down or up too quickly. He said I should be “all good”, and to come back if I wasn’t. This reset worked like a stretched piece of tape, just barely holding down my popping-up dizziness. I felt like I was still dizzy, but also like there was something holding me back in my inner ear from being in full washing machine mode. I found myself back in his office a month later when the tape was ripped away. 

My doctor tried to reset the crystals in my ear once more, and again looked to see if my eyes were twitching; they were completely still. He said he was stumped. He referred me to a balance specialist and told me to go twice a week for six weeks to start. I didn’t know balance centers existed. When I walked in the next day with my paperwork in hand and saw that I was the youngest patient at the balance center, I understood why. 

I worked with a thorough, incredible doctor named Jisu, who was unwaveringly confident and indisputably brilliant. She took her time checking me out and listening to my symptom stories. After running multiple tests, Jisu told me that my vestibular system (the system that regulates balance) was destroyed, most likely by the COVID I’d had in September. She said that my brain and my body weren’t connecting, so much so that the connection was completely lost, and that’s why I was so dizzy. 

Jisu and my physical therapy tech, Amira, taught me exercises that made me initially dizzy, but that were supposed to reestablish the connection between my brain and my body, sort of like restarting your Wi-Fi at home. They had me stand on a flat, pillow-like pad with my eyes closed so they could assess my balance. I fell over immediately. 

I came back to see Jisu two days later and after she asked me more questions about my dizziness and ran more tests, she thought that I did not have BPPV like my doctor had diagnosed me with initially. She thought I was getting vestibular migraines, which I’d of course never heard of. Jisu explained that my brain was doing the same thing that happens when getting a migraine except the symptoms are intense dizziness and debilitating balance issues. 

I went home and feverishly researched vestibular migraines, only to find out that there is no end to them, no cure in sight. I read that I could control migraine attacks by controlling and refining my diet, reducing my stress, and knowing what triggers the attacks. That seemed so…bleak. I found myself dizzy nearly the entire day, so I knew there were some major changes that needed to be made for me to start to feel even remotely better—let alone safe—within my body.

I now know this vertigo beast within me only wants to be seen, tended to, maybe given some food and held together with proper care. I set out on the journey to figure out how to exist with this beast by my side.  

Most days, my dizziness made me feel completely defeated. The vertigo beast had me wrapped in his arms, holding me back from everything I wanted as I watched my days, and ultimately my life, go by before me. He’d keep me in bed while the world spun around me. He’d throw me, his claws digging into my head, into what felt like another dimension while I tried to fall asleep, he tripped me up just when I felt I was steady for one moment during a vertigo-heavy day. 

But soon, I figured out who this beast was. I stared at him enough to figure out that he was just there to point out things that needed to change within my body. He was there to tell me my nervous system was flailing and needed something to calm it. The beast showed me that I don’t do well with rest, and that needed to change. 

I returned to the balance center twice a week for months, doing my exercises alongside people struggling to get out of their wheelchairs. I felt grateful that I was only dealing with vertigo, no matter how much it was a daily struggle to see straight and not fall over when walking around my neighborhood. The other patients there were usually over seventy years-old, and always smiled at me as I walked in a (not-so-straight) line from one end of the room to the other, moving my head up and down as my eyes followed the tennis ball I was tossing in the air and catching with alternating hands. I’d watch as they’d use all their effort to come through the doors, the doctors and balance techs helping them out of their wheelchairs or carefully moving their walkers away from them. Yes, my whole life was uprooted and torn to shreds by vertigo, but I was still living it with some semblance of ease. The other patients couldn’t stand up without assistance. I realized that I’d take the beast any day over a walker. I felt lucky to battle him over fighting a caregiver with a wheelchair. 

When the world doesn’t spin, it’s gorgeous. Things have meaning again. The girl with the lemonade stand in my neighborhood seems as sugary-sweet as the lemonade in the rows of plastic cups is. The barista who says, “I know it starts with an M, but remind me your name?” strikes me as the most memorable, personal experience that’s happened to me in weeks. I’m reminded that baseball games and the live section on Stevie Nicks’s album “Bella Donna'' and the tiny, easily chewable ice cubes at my parents’ house are all incredible things when I’m not fighting to see straight, when I’m not being thrown around the washing machine. Life is just more beautiful when I’m not army-crawling my way through the day…literally or metaphorically. Although I’m much less dizzy these days after my months of PT, I had to learn that there was still value in the dizzy days. 

As cheesy as it sounds, there is goodness in struggle, even though it’s hard to see most of the time. It’s almost a holy experience, if not the holy experience we have as humans. Even in all the discomfort, there is something sacred about being dizzy; it allows me to slow down, to find something steady to focus on to get the spinning to stop. I’ve spent countless afternoons in bed with my vertigo, getting to know the grooves on the beast’s face as I stare him down, begging him to go away. But those afternoons in bed made me rest—really rest—and I am better for it because I know the true value of that. Little things aren’t so little to me anymore, like my neighborhood walks. I don’t fall into the street or run into lamp posts anymore, and that is a big deal. Driving, working, walking downstairs to the kitchen, and being able to look down at a journal as I write in it are all things I see with fresh eyes because I can now do them easily. 

One of the most fascinating things I read online from someone who also deals with vestibular migraines was this: she said that she has to calm down her nervous system to initially make the spinning stop, even before she takes emergency medicine or gets in bed. She said she sits with her back to a wall and tells herself that she is safe. I thought this was, quite frankly, dumb the first time I read it…until I tried it myself. The next time I was in a bad dizzy spiral, I sat against a wall, my legs crossed under me, closed my eyes, and reluctantly said out loud “I am safe” until, to my surprise, the dizziness started to fade just a bit. 

I’ve come to know that my body has to be my ultimate safe place, even if I don’t want it to be, and that begins with me learning to regulate it. When the world is spinning, when I can’t see what’s in front of me, when things feel out of control, my body is there for me, and I can’t be upset when I feel it’s cursing me with a dizzy spell. My body is there to send me signals when something is off, to warn me when we’re in danger, to help me experience life in the fullest way I can. If it took chronic vertigo to get to that realization, so be it.