Writing Again

For many months I didn’t read much and barely wrote; what writing I did didn’t matter to me. I listened to music only a little. I never sang. I’d put on a TV show to ignore it. I’d look at my phone to ignore it. Sometimes, for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, I’d become fixated on another writer’s career, often one I didn’t want, belonging to someone I don’t respect. These behaviors were evidence of unmooredness and forfeit but they were not the worst of that time.

The worst part—and it didn’t feel like a part, it felt like the whole—was my incessant catastrophizing about the future. I could talk about other topics, sometimes, but I would still be thinking about this. Sam and I visited friends in another state, and in the moments when I caught someone alone or almost-alone, when we weren’t united at the pool or gathered around the kitchen island, I steered the conversation to fires, floods, and famines. I wanted to know if everyone else was as obsessed as I. I thought I’d feel less isolated if they were. But when I was alone with the other woman there, I didn’t do that. Instead, we talked about aging, our mothers, our fathers, leaving New York. There was something corrective in the eye contact and depth of interest it conveyed. Shared curiosity is an emotional splint.

During the visit, there was a severe thunderstorm back home and I texted everyone I knew nearby to ask about the damage though the reassurances they gave were meaningless. My home might not have been cleaved by a falling tree or dismantled by a tornado today, but what about next week? I know that if it doesn't break today, it will break tomorrow. If it doesn't break tomorrow, it will break the day after. Many times I remember Sam’s sister saying, bravely, “it’s inevitable” of her father’s death while she sat hugging her worried mother, tears all around the kitchen table; how she added, “that’s what makes it so scary,” and it somehow shook us into laughter. The absurdity of impermanence, the impossibility of anything else. Like Rae Armantrout’s “Prayers”:

I was having digestive problems again though not in quite the same way as before, and Rifaximin, a drug that is pretty effective against SIBO and costs thousands of dollars without insurance approval (unless you order it through Canada from India, which I did) didn’t help. To my dismay, it seemed to make the situation worse. For about a third of every month, I looked to be in the latter half of a pregnancy. My stomach protruded from morning to night to the next morning, even when I fasted for 12 hours, 18, 24. It’s not just vanity. I was uncomfortable, often nauseated, and my clothes didn’t fit. It made me feel insane, like I didn’t understand something basic about my own body or I was gaining weight and in denial.

Back in the earliest years of my gut struggle, when I mistakenly thought I had it so bad, if I went without eating for long enough my belly would be eventually be slack and concave. This wasn’t an attainable state now no matter what I did. I have methods of occasional influence but ultimately I’m of no consequence to my bacteria though I’m both their environment and their creation. We impact each other, to whatever extent we can said to be separate—but I am at their mercy, which is also to say they are unwittingly, helplessly, at their own.

When my doctor suggested I go on a no amylose diet, I cried. No amylose means no gluten but also no oats, no rice, nothing that grows underground except (thank god) onions and garlic.¹ The least disruptive foods to eat for my varieties of dysbiosis are always animal products. But I’m a vegan the way I’m a wife and a writer. “It would only be for two months,” a friend tried to console me. “You can do anything for two months.” I just didn’t want to have to think about food that much, didn’t want it to be another minor ordeal within the consuming existential one. And I clung to the familiar reassurance of baked goods because it was the only pleasure, however denuded, that could be had on demand.

This fatalistic, abject attitude toward my own life was unsustainable. I recognized the need for interruption. I thought religion might help, not its doctrine (though maybe that, in the most beneficent passages) but the physical space and company. Reassuring, compassionate people, perhaps, or comforting subconscious recall? I have a childhood history with Christianity. I used to pray, a lot. I used to believe white Jesus was the face of love and salvation, not in a dogmatic way but in that I saw sweetness in his features, trusted the adults who said he was good, trusted that he loved me and so loved him. But even progressive, rainbow flag-flying, Black Lives Matter churches invoked “praise” and “worship” on their websites. The creepiness was like a suffocating, unwashed, ancient drapery I’d have to fight my way through and I had no faith of something worth the struggle waiting on the other side, nor that there was another side at all.

I’d tapered off of Wellbutrin in an act of preparation; when full chaos came, I didn’t want to be casually dependent on a substance beyond my own manufacture or approximation. Also, I thought I was no longer depressed. But from inside my gradually boiling pot of water, I realized the water was boiling and so I went back on it. The ideal is to “need” neither drugs nor religion, but why? Because the ideal state is to have no need at all? I have ideals, yet I also have need. And the ideals are a need, too.

After two months back on Wellbutrin, I tried the (vegan) no amylose diet and started new supplements. I read voraciously, I listened to music, trying to pour nourishment into my brain, capable again of picking up the cup. There was a week not long ago when I felt so happy and giddy that it was like my 20th birthday when I snorted a fat line of what was allegedly meth and traipsed after a boy I loved all over my favorite city. I still had bad stints and despaired, but Sam reminded me that I’d felt normal, not too long ago, and he was right. Relief was possible though fleeting.

We went to visit Sam’s family, our family, and on the first night there we were in bed together and he had his strong perfect thigh pressed all the way up against my center, and his long arm wrapped around my chest, so I was sealed against him at my back but also able to hold part of him at my front and I was overcome with love in the way of a child when she squeezes something precious to her and you see her immersed in the cherishing, like she wouldn’t know her own name. I clutched his arm so tight and hugged his thigh so hard with mine, my skin all against his skin, and he was asleep, or approaching it, and didn’t say a word.

Even before this, before the diet and the ecstatic temporary returns, there was an ambitious stalk growing in our front yard. I asked Sam if he thought the neighbors had intentionally planted it there and he said no. I didn’t think so either. It was too crowded among the planned flowers, straggly and not their style. I was being lazy about pulling it up, and Sam said he could, but he’d been waiting; he kept thinking it would bloom. I teased him for that irrational, dreamy supposition. It could not have more obviously been a weed. Several days passed and it became clear the stalk was going to bloom, and it did, into a multi-headed sunflower, the tallest and brightest presence in the garden. Like all weeds, it was there of its own accord, because the conditions had been right.

This occurrence was consistent with aspects of our marriage, how we relate to the world and each other, and is therefore a metaphor. When I recognized myself thinking this way, I knew I was ready to write again.

Next week: Curtis Sittenfeld and writerly self-revelation

1  If you google this diet, you’ll find a lot about “mold” afflictions and I don’t even know what those are. My issue is a klebsiella overgrowth. You can read a little more about klebsiella and amylose here, though I don’t have AS either. Amylose is desirable in most circumstances so please don’t cut it out on a whim because you feel bloated. If you have gut health problems, I think it would behoove you to get help from a true expert (probably a naturopath or an MD with naturopathic tendencies, and make sure you like them!)