What do I know

I am petrified of social media. In the past I have:  - gone private when I feel like I'm getting too much attention  - deactivated my account before a controversial story is published  - actively refrained (with 80 percent success) from posting about holidays and friends and highlights that would misrepresent my life. Broad strokes, these are my reasons: I don't like being seen by so many people with such little context. I don't like how people get social brownie points by pulling each other down. I don't like the extreme emotions. I don't like the things people infer from posts and use against each other.  I definitely do not like the noise. I don't like it. But I am comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings. In fact, that's how I process them. Writing is my process of understanding. I am able to speak out the different forces in my head. I am able to see myself without judgement. It made perfect sense for me to write and share now: I've been...

The best metaphor to explain pain I've read is this: the nerves are the reporters on the ground sending valuable insight to the brain about what is happening. The brain is the editor who interprets those signals. The pain you feel is the op-ed published in a newspaper. I'm very, very early in understanding the literature on pain, but I do understand that it is an opinion the body is screaming out to you as a messenger of last resort. Pain is the body saying, hi hello ladies, whatever you're doing is not working out for me. This is serious. Pain is body saying, pause, take stock, introspect. Ask why. Ask what. Editors sometimes underplay stories, sometimes over play stories, sometimes completely misdirect you. Only the rarest editor gets it bang on. Such is the business of pain. Your brain could be telling you you're on fire when you're not, your brain could be telling you it's nothing when you're on fire. You're probably doing both. Eventually ...

I have not worn a bra for three years now. When I tell women this, they inevitably ask me about the logistics of living life without a bra. How do I contain my boobies? I don't. I do what men do: I put on a shirt. Here's a little story about how I got here, why this is not revolutionary at all, and why we have all been scammed. *** The women in my family are quite petite; you know, the kind who did "I must I must increase my bust" exercises in school. I was not like them. By very early puberty it became apparent to my litany of body-shaming aunts that I was an early-developer. This was a source of tension between my mom and me. My first memory of this is when I was eleven. My brand new breasts had emerged over the summer, and I was dragged off a tennis court by her because I'd "forgotten" to wear a bra. (I hadn't forgotten, I  was pretending. I think she knew this.) I remember not understanding why. The next memory I have is of watching ...

For seven years, all I’ve thrown at my disease is effort. A few weeks before I turned thirty my rheumatologist and I were talking about stress and all the smaller ways they manifest; waking up not feeling fresh, migraines and headaches, stiff muscles, teeth grinding, jaw pain. What’s also called secondary pain; pain that isn’t explained by the diagnosis but is auxiliary to it. What would’ve been symptoms of stress are aggravated by the SpA. Well anyway, where we landed was on why a lot of people exiting their twenties suddenly discover that throwing effort at a problem does not solve everything. Slogging is not always the solution. Because our bodies slowly run out of all those hormones and excess energy. And that no matter how much we try, sometimes throwing effort at a problem is counter-productive. He talked about how there's a lot of merit in the not-solving of it. In finding a way to make the non-solving bearable and wait for the case to crack itself open. I have found very...

You know I have this fear: That one day my SpA will be so bad I'll struggle to navigate an airport. I'll be one of the young people on a wheelchair, strapped to a buggy with old people, being shepherded by aircraft crew, while everyone else gets to browse the bookstore and choose breakfast dosa. Someone will manage my hand-luggage and I'll be ferried by a much healthier flight attendant my age. I'll be the first to board and the last to alight. Maybe someone I know will see me like this. And I'll smile lamely and wave from a wheelchair. Maybe I'll have to talk sitting. Or unstrap myself before standing up to talk hoping nobody had noticed. Please understand that I laughed till my stomach hurt while writing this. Out of feverish nervousness or because it's really funny I don't know. It's tough, having a chronic, incurable, progressive, degenerative disease. I've lost many things to it already, I don't even know them all. But here's a ...

Have you read My Year or Rest and Relaxation? Oh please do. But that's not why I'm writing this. Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a short essay in the Guardian about the book. About creating a protagonist who just wants to sleep through the misery of being unloved and alone. Anyway, in the essay she writes powerfully and evocatively about why being inside during a plague involuntarily sucks so much: “Doing time” is what we call a sentence in a penal institution. I like to recall what a former prison inmate told me when I asked him what it was like living in solitary confinement: go into your bathroom and lock the door and don’t leave. I tried it. About six minutes in, I started to panic. If I was any good at meditation, maybe I could have actually left my body. I told myself to imagine sun-kissed beaches, puppies, my living room, my mother’s hands, a field of flowers. But the entrapment laced every thought with menace. I got dark inside. Even as someone who has made a career out of...

I'm on the wrong side of the learning curve of a project I'm working on right now and completely consumed by self-doubt. I'm so, so, terrified of putting something out into the world that's so far away from my comfort zone. Rohan says that a little bit of self-doubt is good, but not too much. As if anyone can calibrate feelings so well and dial it up or down seamlessly. But I know that people do get better at it. Because anyone I know who has made anything worthwhile has gotten better at it. Because all the trillion books I've read about writing talk about it. They also say (usually in more elegant words) that managing the fear of being crap is essential to any degree of continued artistic success. Too little and you get cocky, too much and you never make anything. ( FYI I belong squarely in latter group) Rohan was watching Kanan Gill's latest during lunch and I was there for a bit. He talks about art rated "time-pass". How was the movie? Time...