Hammering ourselves into the wrong holes.
Book review time! This memoir-slash-self-help book offers an excellent reframing of the interplay between mental health and chronic illness
When I got home from NIH last month, I’d received a book in the mail from a friend. It was this one:
I texted to thank her, and she texted back: “Nothing screams ‘welcome home’ like a good ol’ mental health related book. 🙃” Everyone needs a few psychotherapist friends, I’m just saying. They’re a delight. But then, I’m someone who reads behavioral science and mental health books in her free time, just for fun...make of that what you will.
Anyway, this book is so awesome that I wanted to share it with you all today. As someone who hasn’t been diagnosed with most of the author’s maladies, I still found a lot to chew on in this memoir. I think you might, too.
Wilson confides in readers like a close friend while presenting a lot of science about the correlations between anxiety and chronic illness. She reveals where medicine let her down as well as where it picked her up off the ground. She offers no clear answers or quick fixes, but for this reader who is still struggling to understand her own medical predicament, that’s part of the book’s charm. Wilson’s book is inspirational because it totally reframes her anxiety disorder as a friendly, trusty companion.
We all have our thing(s), and I came away from this read asking myself a lot of questions. What have I been taught to see as a problem or an illness that I might, instead, make beautiful? What is functional, serving to help me through life, that I too often treat like an impediment to achieving the happiness and high performance I’m “supposed” to experience? And what if happiness and high performance weren’t the goals?
As I poured over Wilson’s story, I realized I’d already written something of my own about making a beast beautiful. I wrote it early in pandemic lockdown, when my new businesses were shuttered. I was on unemployment for several weeks and mired in seizure drug depression. A romantic relationship was starting to derail, and the entire future I’d worked very hard to create was slipping through my grasp. I didn’t yet have Nos-dog by my side, and the universe felt like a very unfriendly place. I got so desperate that I imagined befriending the enemy inside me: my faulty consciousness, complete with its newfound game of abandoning me without warning.
I call the following “Little Hodgepodge,” and it’s a love note to me from my consciousness.
And then one day, I grew tired of living apart from her.
I found her sitting wide-eyed in rimmed glasses—researching, of course. I looked out the windows through her glasses. I gathered all of her many limbs and voices into warm, wide arms. I drew my presence all around hers.
“Little hodgepodge,” I whispered. “I have seen you grow and form yourself into so many shapes. I have seen you struggle and get back up. I have seen you love with your every cell. I have seen you learn, truly learn, and that is why I am still here.
“You are my little hodgepodge, and I am your consciousness. You touch the world I cannot touch and see the world I cannot see, and ours is the most intimate relationship we will ever know. You are my fragile conduit, and I have been here all along, growing alongside you. I am your inner eye, built by your hard-earned experience. I do not speak or act other than to echo what you most don’t want to forget.
“I know I disappeared a few times during your seizures, and that it troubled you to be alone. It troubled me as well. I went dark, and there is no real difference (when you’re in it) between going completely dark for one instant or for an infinity. That shock served a purpose, though. Feeling that lack so strongly is how we know, little hodgepodge, how often and how firmly I have been with you.
“Many people do not ponder their own consciousness until it is leaving them for good. We got lucky. You may not have been trained in the spiritual arts. You may not have been loved adequately. But you were given a real leaper of a brain. I am the consciousness of a person who can dart between hemispheres; who is constantly opening and reopening her heart; who tastes all manner of worldly delights; and who competently tackles each obstacle life sends her way.
“The problem is that you and your fellow humans, dear hodgepodge, will continue to fall short. You and I will weather much more together, I’m afraid. I hope it helps to know that as long as you are any sort of independent being, and until you bleed your carbon back into the air, you are not alone. We are locked in this short yet all-encompassing embrace. Your sights will all be witnessed.
"You, little hodgepodge, who always wanted to be someone’s everything. You are your own whole world. You knew it that bleakest of nights, somewhere above the words you couldn’t grasp with your tired brain. You know it now, at this window. My existence is the reason you can say, whatever happens before the end:
"This, too, does not define me. I am already enough."
How’s that for some creative mental coping?
It’s the word “enough” that makes this a great love note, I think. How often do any of us really feel “enough?”
Back to Wilson’s writing: on pp. 86, she describes how a lifetime of severe chronic anxiety and her Hashimoto’s disease “are both a symptom and a trigger of each other.” She points out that the most common root cause of both autoimmune disease and anxiety is “the systematic hammering of oneself into the wrong holes.”
This sentence hit a nerve. I won’t go into the details here—that’s what my memoir is for. Suffice it to say that I was quite busy hammering myself into some wrong holes right before my sudden cardiac arrest. My husband recalls how my data science job at HUD brought out the worst in me every Sunday night (my own recollection of the last couple months at that job are blissfully hazy due to memory loss from cardiac arrest…but what I do remember is terrible.)
Did burnout cause my breakthrough seizures and sudden cardiac arrest in February? Or did the fact that I already had a lower seizure threshold than most people make me more prone to severe burnout? Does it matter? As Wilson points out, the treatment for both ailments is the same: “slowing down, taking care of yourself, living cleanly and getting gentle and kind.” It took Hashimoto’s to stop Wilson in her tracks. It took me a seizure disorder, COVID, and cardiac arrest.
The things that don’t kill us don’t necessarily make us stronger. Sometimes they make us permanently weaker. And yet the things that tried to kill me made me more aware of what would need to change to make living viable. That is reason enough to see a flash of beauty in the medical mysteries.