Brass Rings & Butt Ulcers

Notes on ambition and other injuries

Oct 23, 2024

Hi! I’ve been working on a few longer form pieces (with the help of a newfound and delightful writing community). Hope you enjoy. Xoxo.

“Eve?” I say, politely at first.

“EVE?” I say, a little louder.

“EEEE-eeee-VE!” now I’m shouting into the face cradle of a massage table.

Was her name Janet?

“Janet?” I whisper.

Fuck it.

The exam paper crinkles as I squirm and finger for the acupuncture needles in my back. One big exhale and then – pop, pop, pop – I’ve pulled most of the needles out. I think I’m on the last one (but really have no idea, I’m flying blind here). Then Eve or maybe Janet finally returns.

“You were supposed to sit for ten more minutes,” she says, my back now moist with antiseptic.

I roll off the table and get dressed as quickly as I can, my neck tweaking as I tie my shoes. I ignore it and jog back to my office.

Three years later, I’ll rush myself to the ER while getting over covid and struggling to breathe. Unsent emails and unreturned calls will flash like solar flares in my mind as I suck on an inhaler and lay in a CT, but I’ll have the sense not to yank out the IV and EKG cables. A few days after the ER, I’ll file for disability and write the words “long covid” for the first time. I won’t return to my job for another year.

I’ve had a lot of time to question my fate since I got sick: I’ve pored over scientific journals and measured myself against risk factors for post-acute covid. I’ve grappled with the idea of random chance. I’ve admitted that it was probably my fault, not because of one wrong turn, but because of a thousand veers in the wrong direction.

I lay out all of those veers and look over them like a mosaic:

I see piles of candy wrappers and empty bags of chips from mini-bars in New York and Berlin and Plano, my reflection growing puffy from cortisol and carbs. I remember avoiding the gym (afraid of that reflection) and then diving in too deep, throwing out my back, spending a weekend upright in bed then hopping on a red-eye to Chicago anyways. I feel the spongy skin beneath my underwear right on my tailbone, a butt ulcer from sitting for twelve hours straight on a $20 dining chair during lockdown. I feel my teeth on my tongue, my fingernails in the webbing of my thumb, my eyes twitching behind their lids. I taste blood, salt.

One thing is clear: if my illness was getting hit by a train, I was the one who strapped myself to the tracks.

Why? Good question.

I wanted the money.

What for? I’m not sure. Not designer handbags or that Cartier bracelet I wonder how everyone can afford. I did want to fly first class. (I still do). Maybe I wanted the illusion of clarity, to pick a path and stick with it. I definitely wanted to sit tall in my seat when friends talked about vesting cycles and fundraising rounds and exits. I wanted to wrap my arms around my feelings of superiority, to hold those feelings in place as they slipped away.

Yeah, I wanted the money.

Don’t these things always seem comically obvious in retrospect?

The definitely-not-worth-it boyfriends, the too-good-to-be-true jobs, the compelling multi-level-marketing schemes that, sure, sound a lot like Herbalife but “are different, I promise!” We laugh off red flags over brunch and ask playful what-ifs like, “they’re your dream partner, but have a handlebar mustache or are rude to waiters, would you stay?” We bargain hours with our family for the chance at a strong review. We ascribe the feelings in our gut to social anxiety or how busy we are or, god forbid, the Sunday Scaries. Or maybe we cast the feelings aside.

The ending of these stories – the trainwrecks – always seem so clear. I listen to country music and read fables as a kid and follow those inspirational instagram accounts that everybody knows about but never mentions. Before I got sick, I understood intellectually that you’re supposed to live like you are dying and that money not in service of a happy, healthy life means nothing and that gratitude somehow seems to be the answer to everything. Oof. These are truisms for a reason.

And yet here I am, guilty of having forgotten.

What if I had listened to Tim McGraw and actually lived like I was dying before I felt like I might?

I’m routinely seduced by a daydream: I go back in time and hold on tight to these truisms. Maybe have one tattooed on my wrist. I go back to the acupuncturist, lay peacefully on the table and make idle chat with Eve/Janet (I’ll know her name this time). After, I walk back to my office and never apologize for the time I was away. Riding this high, everything changes: my clients stop infiltrating my dreams, I suddenly hold boundaries everywhere and all the time, my keyboard is never wet with my tears again. Six years pass and maybe I catch covid or maybe I don’t but it doesn’t matter because my immune system is strong, my self care routine perfected. I finally make partner at my firm and my hair is shiny in my headshot.

It’s a lie. A fool’s errand. Not only can I not go back in time, even if I could, absolutely nothing would change. I’d strap myself to those tracks and wait for the brass ring over and over and over. Until I had a reason not to.

When we know better, we do better. But we need a reason to know better.

Intellectual understanding is never enough. We’ve all done it: read the story of a hardworking lawyer’s dying regret, watched the documentaries about how sugar or plastic are killing us, heard the statistics on the hedonistic treadmill. We stop, tilt our heads, maybe bookmark something and share it with a friend. Then we go right back to whatever we were doing before.

We have to learn these truisms for ourselves – date the asshole, miss the family event for work, get effed over by a good deal or a Nigerian prince – not just for the story, but because they are the things that give us a reason to know better.

I can’t undo all of the harm I did to myself, the thousand ways I veered off of the course of my health. All I can do now is look back and laugh at myself, like I’m doing today as I sit in the same doctor’s office I walked out of all of those years ago. I’m here because my back’s a little tight, this time not from work but from a multi-day kayaking trip in Sweden.

It was a fun trip, but I’ll probably never go kayaking like that again.