on illness and health, and staying in the game
One of the things you notice as you get older is that your body sometimes does things you don’t want it to do and cracks in ways you don’t want it to crack and sometimes it just behaves like a petulant child. Over the past couple of months, I have been reminded of that fact in a way that almost brought me to tears, and not the cuddly sympathetic kind that people who blather about “healthy masculinity” parrot.
The below is what I managed to salvage from the experience. It is not particularly noble or well-syntaxed, but I hope it resonates with at least someone.
Indirect credit to Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places for giving me the wherewithal to write this.
A small fuck you to my body, that gave me over two decades of faithful service with all of its interruptions and crashes and marathons and victories until it failed in a way I could not forgive. I love you you beautiful bastard and I also hate you. I hate you and I love you so much. Hate love love hate. Such is the nature of illness, of being unwell. Your body is a stranger to you now. Like a bastard child that stole your credit card and crashed your car and burned down your house. You despise him more than anything you could despise anything in the whole wide world. Your own flesh and blood, a betrayal like no other. The only one you thought you could trust. And yet at the same time, if it were within your power to pay a million dollars, to make him whole and wide-eyed and beautiful again, you would do it in a heartbeat. This body of mine that I curse for playing Judas, leaving me broken and in pain for no apparent reason. Would that I could forgive you right here, right now, and make you and I whole again. Would that we all had that power, to be able to speak to misbehaving body parts or restless pathogens and just order them to cut it out. Of course, such a plea is as quixotic as it is senseless. But when you are in pain and your body no longer does what it did perfectly a couple of days or weeks or months ago, you become more open to anthropomorphizing things than you used to.
I stare out over the lake where dozens, hundreds of families are blissfully partying. Nothing tests the true character of one's soul more than seeing others happy when one is in pain. Blessed are those who suffer and do not begrudge others their happiness. Saints, priests, and paraplegic motivational speakers. The rest of us make do. O jealousy, its pain makes us human, but what a price to pay for humanity. I look out at them. I should marvel at the beauty and complexity and precarity of existence. So many things that had to happen, so many meetings and love and kisses that had to occur for all those people to be born and grow up and enjoy a weekend with their families on a picnic in July. There is a part of me that loves them and there is a part of me that asks, if you could trade places with one of those happy strangers right now, condemning one of them to your own fate, would you do it? That old Twilight Zone episode comes to mind. Would you push a button and kill a random stranger to get a million dollars? In this instant, to be healthy again overrides even a million million dollars. The body is fragile, so fragile. You can earn money, but to earn another body requires technology we do not have in an era we have not yet breached. Health is there, until it isn't. And my body feels broken, my old memories of what it was like to be whole before taunting me. (I momentarily envy the congenitally impaired, even as I realize how saying that makes me sound and look. Like an asshole. But I can't deny that being able to know what being healthy feels like does not make being unwell any better.)
I reject this proposal. I shudder at my own inchoate darkness. I do not like that my bodily failures have paved the way for justifying my moral ones. I am grateful that such buttons do not exist in this world- or if they do, at least they are ones I am not in a position to press.
Play the games you can play, with the hand you’re dealt.
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(footnote:
I was going to publish this as is, but something came to me.
I used to go to therapy a while ago for depression and one of the things my shrink used to say was to never end on something bad. If you screw up cooking a meal, have some dessert. If you write an angry diary entry, find an optimistic quote to add afterwards. If you go to bed angry or sad, think about how at least you have a roof over your head. You can whine and vent and rage all you want but you need to end on something positive. You have to break the cycle. I hated that shrink because it's so much easier to give advice when you're on one side of the couch than to receive it when you're on the other, even as I grudgingly accepted that in that office I nevertheless felt a brief respite from the act of having to live while pretending to be happy. I remember thinking at the time that therapy was stupid and that I would always be miserable for the rest of my life for intractable, real structural reasons that had nothing to do with my cognitive thoughts. Stuff like jobs, girlfriends, and money (more specifically, not having any of them). I was both right and wrong because I stopped being depressed for a while afterwards and I had a few good years, despite all this happening now as I write this. I even managed to get and hold down a job for a little while.
But as I'm sure a lot of you know, this merry-go-round never ends. To live is to confront misery, both banal and tragic. Very few of us live truly charmed lives, although if you're reading this you have an internet connection and let's be honest Substack attracts a certain kind of internet user that is a class above the average internet user, so it's likely you probably live in the 90th percentile of global human well-being right now. I know that even with my current health situation, I probably do as well. Okay, maybe 80th if I am feeling particularly grumpy. I suppose this undercuts my own argument a bit but seeing as how this argument was about how my life sucks I guess that is a good argument to undercut.
The reality of depression and adverse life circumstances is that you have to make undercutting your own depressive arguments a full-time job. For better or worse I have some experience doing that. But illness and poor health are something that's difficult to abstract and cognify away in a way that being turned down for a date isn't.
Still, you have to try. I've read David Burns and unfortunately as much as I hate to say it the man does have some pretty good advice.
If you, like me, are contemplating the loss of your own bodily invincibility, my thoughts are with you. I am in no position to convince you that this will pass or it will get better. Any illusions that I could provide succor to people with that boilerplate vanished the day I encountered my own demons. But I can tell you without grimacing that I have had good moments among the bad, and I hope it does not make me a bad person to believe that you must have had some as well.
I have survived depression, anxiety, and a host of other physical ailments before. My last big health scare was in 2021. At the time I thought I would never get better and that my life as a normally functioning person was over. I turned out to be wrong in that regard even as I later learned that surviving one crisis does not immunize you from future ones. But all I will say is this: I write this because there is hope to be salvaged among the pain. In the past, when I thought I had no hope, I did not write at all. There was no point. And to have a point among the pain- that is the hope you must chase. As I chase mine, despite the difficulty, I wish you all the best in chasing yours.)