Bryan Johnson has a part of himself that he calls Nighttime Bryan. Nightime Bryan overeats, doesn’t sleep well, and makes decisions that aren’t in his best interest. Studies show that we all have a version of this within ourselves, and that this part usually comes forward in the middle of the night during a mid-night awakening. The typical scenario is that we wake up during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, which also happens to be when we’re vulnerable to things like worrying, ruminating, and catastrophizing, as well as seeing ourselves and the world through a clouded lens, one that tends to exaggerates our negative traits, minimize our sense of self-worth, anticipate the worst in every situation, and fail to recognize anything positive. I call this our Midnight Part. In myself, I call this part Midnight Dana.
Let me introduce you to Midnight Dana. She’s a little different from Nighttime Bryan in that she’s trying to help. (I actually think Nighttime Bryan is trying in his own way to help Bryan, or at least to call attention to a problem, but that’s not how Bryan Johnson characterizes Nighttime Bryan.) Midnight Dana remembers things. She doesn’t mean to. She just does. Her body remembers. She’s a time traveler who can go to any point in the past where she’s needed, and by that I mean where her memory is needed. She’s important and necessary, but witnessing her deep knowledge and attempting to communicate with her is not easy.
I woke up at 3:38 a.m. trundled from sleep into wakefulness by a disconcerting dream that involved countless rows of girls’ dorm-room beds extending into the distance behind Vince McMahon, the resident assistant, who was standing in the foreground in a light-gray plaid suit waiting for all the girls to arrive.
Midnight Dana did not like that dream. She immediately thought about the semi-private dorm room she’ll be staying in at the summer residency for Pacific University if I decide to enter that program. The thing that terrifies Midnight Dana about this situation is the shared bathroom. Bathrooms have never been safe spaces for Dana, and Midnight Dana remembers what’s happened in them. It’s as if every cell in her body knows, even the ones that have turned over countless times since those abuses occurred. Midnight Dana is part of the institutional memory of Dana Henry Martin. She lives in the decentralized array of awareness that resides within my body. She also interacts with the world around her, responding to inputs from my waking and sleeping worlds and experiences.
Still frothy with sleep, I receded and Midnight Dana came to the forefront. She laid in bed as the bathroom memories flashed like View-Master stereoscopes, but she was also running. Her heart rate was fast and erratic. She was sweating. She took quick, shallow breaths. Her head suddenly hurt like hell. Midnight Dana was in flight mode.
By 4 a.m., Midnight Dana had made a slew of decisions that started with not attending Pacific University and ended with not writing poetry anymore. Midnight Dana made a plan to do nothing but sit somewhere and listen to birds for the next thirty years or so.
Midnight Dana and I are in conversation this morning. We’re talking about ways she can feel safe at the residency and keep writing poetry. What does she need? How can I advocate for her? I want her to know I see her, hear her, and appreciate her. She’s trying to keep me safe and also keep me from walking into a situation that could be incredibly difficult and painful. She’s going to be there, too, if we go to Oregon. I need to meet her where she’s at and advocate for that part of myself so I don’t become a fear-driven organism whose only option is to run fast and hard and away.
This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems model. We all have parts, and we all need to listen to those parts and bring them into Self. Our Midnight Parts can be teachers if we let them. We can bring them into our awareness and into our hearts while ushering our whole selves to, or at least toward, safety.
Midnight Dana is both an exile and a firefighter. She’s been ignored, silenced, and shamed—even by me—and she looks for quick fixes that will allow her to avoid painful feelings. She makes sense developmentally given my past, namely my childhood. I want her to have that life of listening to birds. And I want her to have so much more than that, including poetry, which is where she sings alongside me.
Today is not my day to experience the napture, that is being transported from Earth to heaven in the midst of a fabulous nap. Apparently, I will not have any nap at all today, despite being mostly awake all night with my sweet dog, who’s not feeling well.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Fitbit thinks I’m asleep all the time for some reason, including while I was sopping my sweet dog’s vomit out of the wool rug in the bedroom while the ceiling fan—which I’d turned on accidentally in the chaos of the moment—mocked my nearly bare back with wave after wave of cold air. Maybe I really was asleep. Maybe I’m asleep now. Maybe we evolved from sleep into wakefulness, but we’re never fully awake, even when we think we are. Maybe Fitbit knows this about me, about you, about all of its wearers.
Lately, Fitbit’s also been like, Hey, your heart rate’s totally low these days, super job, which doesn’t make sense because I’m not properly executing any of my self-care stuff. I’m barely keeping up with the 57 biomarkers I routinely track, not to mention the dozen or so behaviors I monitor. I haven’t tallied the exact number of behaviors I track, which shows you how much I’ve been slacking. Data only works if you work that data, right? Can I get a high five?
I mean, I’m trying to be a data-driven lifeform, but I’m failing better day after day. I’m having carbs again this afternoon, for one thing: the no-bake cookies that are my undoing when I allow myself to be undone, that is eating an uncorseted diet that’s bound to tank my efforts at improved mental health. If I had my continuous glucose monitor on, I could see in real time what those cookies do to my glucose levels, and from that data I could infer what’s happening to my mitochondria. I could look at old data, but it’s not the same. I need to see in real time what I’m doing to myself so I’ll stop doing it.
This is serious work, and I’m messing it up, and I can’t even take a nap, which seems like it would help. Why can’t I nap? 1: Birds. They’re too loud. 2. Lexi. She’s too restless. 3. Heat. It’s 76 degrees in here, and I’m too hot, the kind of hot one feels when one is menopausal, though I’m long past those days. I’m carb-hot. I ate carbs yesterday, and it’s made me hot. Not in a good way. 4. Husband. Things with, including accusations that I said something mean in all caps when I believe I said it all lowercase. 5. Husband again. Making silly vulgar gestures at me while someone I was talking to on the phone was telling me something awful and important. 6. The awful and important thing I was told and how I can’t do anything about it and how the whole world seems like a gaping maw sometimes, not at all heavenly, not at all a place where naps can be imagined or hoped for, let alone naptures.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Our water purifier started making a high-pitched noise a few minutes ago, a steady ewwww like a piece of industrial equipment humming in the distance, at once piercingly but almost inaudibly. I unplugged it, but the sound made me hyperfocused on my tinnitus, so now I’m just a body that screeches and won’t stop.
I took some sleep medicine, something I rarely do. As I wait for it to kick in, night thoughts do their dark work. I don’t ruminate about minor issues like some folks. My waking nightmares are about my father, my family, Oklahoma, me, the ways in which I’ve been purged, and the things I feel like I need to purge that find me at night when I’m closer to my personal unconscious and the collective unconscious than I am during the day.
I had an unthinkable thought that was immediately ushered by my circuitry to every central and distal part of my body. My feet. My hands. My tongue. My scalp. My shoulders. My gut.
What if, I thought. What if it’s true?
This particular thought is a hard one to put on a shelf until I can process it in the light of day. The “what if” feels less like a possibility than a haunting, a visitation declaring what the world is and who I am in it. I don’t like either. I hope I’m seeing an old lady that’s really an owl, like in one of those optical illusions.
The unconscious realms are beautiful and terrifying. I’d prefer a different ratio of beauty to terror right now. I’d rather experience both while asleep, not while sitting in bed awake, my warm dog pressed up against my calf doing what I can’t do: slumber. I feel her breath on my foot. I feel her chest rise and fall. I feel how soft and small and fragile she is. I feel how much I love her and how much I don’t want to be a monster in a monstrous world.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Terror is my second least favorite. Monster is my third least favorite. To be an awake, terrified monster inside of what is monstrous is nothing I’d wish on anyone.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two shifts. The first was from early evening until sometime in the middle of the night. The second was from early morning until it was time to get up and start the day’s work. The waking period in the middle of the night wasn’t just for reading or sitting by the fire. People played cards, canoodled, had little get-togethers, and more. It was dark and cool and simply a good time to be awake. A romantic time. A playful time. A productive time.
In 2008, when I had one of my bouts of thyrotoxicosis—which made sleep difficult and resulted in severe sleep anxiety—a therapist told me about two-sleeps. She could see my sleep patterns falling into that rhythm and encouraged me to embrace that rather than fighting it. I had charts and graphs and other excessively detailed stuff documenting my personal sleep woes because that’s how I roll. It was a lot, the way my personal wardrobe database, which I maintained for six years, was a lot. (I can be a lot or, as I like to say a lot a lot—think quirky, colorful, dysfunctional.)
Hold up, the therapist said. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being hypervigilant about your sleep, you could try this approach instead. Hers was for sure the better plan. It was hard to let go of my recordkeeping and data management, but I did it at her urging.
The change in perspective and approach got me through those long months until my thyroid function returned to normal. I should note that thyrotoxicosis isn’t like hyperthyroidism in that you can’t treat it. You just have to wait it out. The whole process from thyrotoxicosis (or thyroid storm) to hypothyroidism to a return to a euthyroid state takes about a year.
A long damned year that’s difficult, creatively productive, and hard on a marriage, or at least has been hard on my marriage. It’s not easy to live with someone who has a snack-and-book midden stashed in the bed because they need to eat constantly and must always have reading material ready for those inevitable jolts from sleep. And also a slew of notepads and a handheld recording device so flashes of brilliance can be documented, such as aphorisms that float in on the ether and strange dreams that can’t not be cast in stone or at least scrawled in pencil in feverish, sloppy detail. (Pencil because, while graphite is an inferior writing material, I have a no ink-in-the-bed rule, as should everyone. We have sheets to think about, folks. We don’t need to add fighting ink stains to our list of daily tasks, especially not when we’re thyrotoxic.)
It’s not easy to live with someone who’s in fight or flight for the better part of a year, edgy and jumping at every little sound, balled up at times saying I can’t take it when will I feel normal again, whose OMing her way through moment after excruciating moment, who asks her mother-in-law in Iowa to have a bag packed in case she needs to come take care of her when she’s thirty-six years old and her mother-in-law has better things to do like tending to her gorgeous, gazeboed yard and going to church and keeping her husband from wandering into the back of the garage never to be seen again because he’s finally going to put that classic car together, the one that’s been a tangle of pieces and parts strewn about the property for four decades. In short, someone who’s devolved into a twitchy little miscreant. It wasn’t easy on Jon. I wasn’t easy on Jon. But two-sleeps made a big difference.
I still approach my sleep this way if I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a two-sleep night, I think. Rather than toss and turn in bed, I get up and do what I do, which is read and write and, sometimes, snack. Tonight, I’m up with GI distress and heartburn because of unfortunate but yummy birthday dinner choices yesterday evening. I came home and crashed, accidentally, at 8:40 p.m. and woke a few minutes ago bloated and nauseated, like a puffer fish that didn’t mean to puff and can’t unpuff and whose innards are on fire.
Is this a good time to write? Who knows. Will I produce anything of value during these waking hours? Based on this journal entry, it doesn’t seem like I will. I just know it’s not a good time to be horizontal. It is a good time to take Pepto Bismol and be vertical. So that’s what I’m doing until my second sleep begins. (Technically, since I’m sitting down, I’m vertical then horizontal then vertical again.)
Metadata paralysis is a real phenomenon, and folks like me live the experience every day. If you see someone with obvious symptoms of metadata paralysis, let them know you care. Take interest in their metadata tree. Say things like, “Good work. What a lovely metadata tree you’re working on. So many branches. I can’t wait to see what it grows into.”
Part two of this essay will be redacted in its entirety because it’s boring. Why? It’s self-indulgent and not self-reflective. The metadata here is value: subset one, possesses; subset two, doesn’t possess.
I’m falling asleep sitting up. Hello, theta waves. Bring on the strange brilliance.
I get it. His name is Jack Tripper and he trips all the time as part of his physical comedy. He also trips out on what others are doing and saying, so he’s also a metaphorical tripper.
Quick on the draw isn’t something anyone’s ever called me with regard to understanding plays on words, but they did call me fast fingers in grade school because I learned to count like lightning on my hands during math drills as a workaround for my dyscalculia and working-memory deficits. I won those drills. Laugh away, children, laugh away. What the world needs is a dyscalculia superhero named Fast Fingers.
Dyscalculia is either part of dyslexia or it’s a separate but similar entity. It depends on what metadata you use, that is, how you organize the information pertaining to each phenomenon.
Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. That looks funny. This calculia. Miss Calculia. That’s Ms. Calculia to you. Dana “Ms. Calculia” Martin. Now there’s a name. A Dana by any other name still can’t count to ten without using her fingers.
They gave me a free dessert because it was my birthday. That’s what happened with dinner. And also a plate of fried everything. That part wasn’t free. I paid for the plate of fried everything. My metadata here is dinner: subset one, fried everything; subset two, dessert.
I didn’t have to eat it. I wanted to eat it. Then I didn’t want to eat it but kept eating it. I’m trying hard to eat. I need to eat. My metadata here is health: subset one, presence; subset two, absence. Or is it life: subset one, congruous with; subset two, incongruous with?
My throat is getting dry. The Pepto Bismol is coagulating, if that’s the right word, near my uvula. One time, a big, hard thing traveled from my sinuses down into my throat. I choked on it for a while, then coughed it into a tissue, thereby saving my own life. It was fossilish and had ridges like the roof of a mouth. This incident (or shall I call it an *indecent*) happened in from of my mother-in-law. The metadata here is mother-in-law: subset one, what not to do in front of; subset two, what I did in front of. Additional metadata is bodies: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange.
As with bodies, also with minds: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange. Or is the main category bodymind: one thing, not two? As in, we mine the bodymind when we should be embodying it. As in, why is the bodying of the bodymind something we mind, whether it’s ours, yours or mine? As in, what’s mine is my bodymind and is not to be mined.
This is a real mindfield. Good night. I’m off for part two of my two-sleeps night. May our collective dreams break the bough, rattle the house, and set free a wee mouse who runs the mazes of our minds. Wouldn’t that be amazing.
Insomnia Diary Entry One: The price I’m paying for going to bed at 9:29 p.m. last night is waking to strange dreams and observations at 1:29 a.m. this morning. As if that weren’t bad enough, my weaving room clock is four hours slow for some reason, so when I dragged myself in here to write down my strange dreams and observations, it said it was only 9:29 p.m. I feel like I slept zero minutes, not two-hundred-forty weird, totally off, minutes. What do I do now? Eat? Vomit? I hate waking up like this, being off like this. My ear wax is melting. The light from this pink Himalayan salt lamp is too bright. I think I need to hydrate.
Insomnia Diary Entry Two: Based on my symptoms, I’d say my TSH level is moving around wildly again and that it has been since I started a new dose of thyroid replacement and a new form of the medication, this time an amber liquid that burns my gums. My body no longer knows what to do, how to regulate, its TSH levels. Within a month’s time, I’ll swing from clinically hypothyroid to severely thyrotoxic. This has been happening every month for a year or so.
Heart palpitations are back. Big tears are back, rolling ones like dew drops on iris leaves in Kansas on any given spring morning. Nausea is back. Exhaustion. Word-finding issues.
I forgot my maternal grandmother’s first name two days ago. (It’s Ruth, a word I always see as red, like a ruby. Ruth, my gem of a grandmother, my red velvet cake grandmother, my faceted grandmother throwing off an eerie red light, my film noire grandmother if the lighting was black and red, not black and white. And she, Ruth, surely was all of those things. So how could I forget her name, given all the ways synesthesia allows me to vividly see it?)
I confused trammel and trample yesterday. (I didn’t just make that play on words in a post for fun. I actually forgot the difference between the words, then turned my language-related malady into a wry comment on nature and culture, or something like that. A real poor-me of a post.)
I forgot traffic (n.) and traffick (v.) both exist. I’m still not convinced they’re both real, but the dictionaries seem to think so. I’m pretty sure I’ve been leaving the “k” off the verb form for years, a startling realization that leads me to ruminate about all the other words I must be getting wrong without realizing it. It’s like my late-90s disk and disc meltdown all over again. Floppy? Frisbee? C or K? K or C?
I’m so tired of being dyslexic and having auditory processing disorder and working memory issues and attention deficits with ironic hyperfocus and rumination and neat and tidy OCD and complex PTSD and regular PTSD and other flavors of anxiety on top of my primary immunodeficiency and autoimmune diseases and arrhythmias and dysautonomia and possible kidney issues and whatever the hell is going on with iron overloading and concurrent anemia and TSH issues that come and go without explanation and that cancer I had and may still have and the edema and the asthma and whatever else I can’t even remember at this moment.
It’s a lot, folks. It’s getting old. Y’all, I just want to move around the cabin of life freely and with some assurance that I’m doing an OK job at that. Instead, I end up back by the lavatories when I think I’m heading toward the emergency exit. It’s sheer disorientation much of the time: in my mind, in my body, and at the seams where my mind and body meet the world.
I was trying to make a play on the cabin reference above by following it with the lavatories and emergency exit references, but it didn’t work. It’s too jumbled, the image too burdened. I can’t bring myself to delete the attempt, though, because my body-mind really worked hard at it and I’m so exhuasted and here come the big dewy tears and this water isn’t hydrating me at all because I’m still a walking desert and my GI tract is full of angry fists that feel like a mob is trying to punch its way out of me and I’m so awaketired, so hungrynauseated, so tinglenumb, that the cursed trinity (cabin/lavatories/emergency exit) isn’t going anywhere. It’s staying put. It’s evidence of and a testament to my dysfunction.)
All the hunger all the time and all the eating all the time without moving the needle on the scale at all are back. Parasthesias are back. Maybe some neuropathy, too, which I don’t even want to acknowledge, but the weird stabbing pains in my legs and the sudden feeling of having stepped in water when there is no water aren’t going anywhere, it seems.
Some of this is also from having dysautonomia. Some of this is from having immune system dysregulation and all the diseases and conditions that flow from that dysregulation. Not all of this is because of my TSH dysregulation, and I suspect that dysregulation isn’t a thing on its own, anyway, but instead flows from some combination of my other health issues, as well as from my trauma. Traumas, let’s be honest. It’s traumas, plural. It’s also trauma and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
* Why did Facebook turn my n in parentheses into a thumbs down? I’m too tired to fight you on that, Facebook. Have it your way. You always do. We’re all just here for your profit and pleasure, Facebook. Don’t think we don’t know that’s the case.**
**Oh, I know why. I forgot the periods after the “n” and the “v” on second reference. Fine. My bad, Facebook.
Insomnia Diary Entry Three: I think people count sheep when they can’t sleep because sheep sounds like sleep, so we’re indirectly invoking sleep by using sheep as a kind of mantra, one that allows us to sidle up to sleeping without getting sleep anxiety as we think about how we’re not sleeping.
Oh, no. That’s not it at all. Apparently, shepherds in medieval Britain had to keep a headcount of their sheep each night if they used communal grazing land, so they counted their sheep before going to sleep to ensure they were all there.
Still, I think my thing is also correct: I think sheep works because it’s a stand-in, soundwise, for the thing we’re trying to do, which is sleep.
Insomnia Diary Entry Four: I had two thoughts upon waking at 1:29 a.m. First thought: I’ve reached the age where I can no longer tell if physical exertion is building muscle or destroying muscle. Second thought: The price I pay for whatever I’m doing is having to do more of whatever I’m doing.
Insomnia Diary Entry Five: I am not dovetailed to this world. I’m glued and stapled to it.
Insomnia Diary Entry Six: When someone starts a sentence with the words I’m no conspiracy theorist, you can put money on the fact that a conspiracy theory (technically, a conspiracy hypothesis) will complete that utterance.
Insomnia Diary Entry Seven: I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I don’t trust the water here in Toquerville, Utah. On record, our water management people said at a city council meeting that they sometimes forget to check the water pumps. Then, earlier this year, one of the water pumps broke, and our irrigation water was turned off until a new pump could be ordered.
I just don’t know. You know, govnmnt and whatnot. You never can tell. Never can tell. No, sir. No, siree.
I do know that, without proper filtration, there’s one-thousand-one-hundred times the “safe” amount of arsenic in our water, and that figure isn’t hyperbolic. I looked into it. You know, inurnet and whatnot.
What I’m getting at is this: I drank all my water just now, and I needed more water. My husband and I recently bought a fancy office-level water filter thing that makes cold water, hot water, tea, and coffee. We decided to do it because govnmnt and inurnet and all that, and also because my gums were starting to burn after brushing my teeth with, you guessed it, the local water. (I see a pure D bona fide theory emerging here, not just a measly hypothesis!)
We love the new water filter thing. Just adore it. It’s like the watery baby we never had. We coo at it. We pet it. But it makes this rattling sound whenever it’s used as it pumps more water into whatever parts of the machine need water pumped to them. So I couldn’t fill my water bottle with filtered water just now or else I’d wake my husband up and he’d be all why’d you wake me up you’re ruining my sleep and I’d have no choice but to be all because my own sleep is ruined forever and always and we’re married and this is the for worse part of it which you agreed to in front of that pantheist minister in Eureka Springs Arkansas during a freak March snowstorm back in 1999 so deal with it just deal with it and rub my shoulders while you’re here and get me some filtered water too please and thank you and I love you and don’t leave me and hold me and get away from me and I’m sorry so so sorry I’m just so tired and hurt and tired. And I wouldn’t want to do that, so here I am filling myself with liquid arsenic, folks. The things a good wife does. The things a good wife does.
Insomnia Diary Entry Eight: How do I select my titles? That depends. Sometimes, I write a big thing while I have insomnia, then I look at the thing, my eyes fall to some of the words in the thing, and in my bleary state, I think, Gee whiz, those random words seem like they’d make a good title. Usually, they do. Case in point: Henceforth, the collective title of these insomnia diary entries shall be “Cabin Lavatories Emergency Exit.”
Actually, I think I’ll make the whole series into a poem. But first, I must sheep. I mean sleep. One two three four. Or arrhythmically like my heart: one two (pause) three (longer pause) four.
Insomnia Diary Entry Nine: to sheep, perchance to leme.
Insomnia Diary Epilogue: I slept. Finally. I dressed up like Liza Minnelli after we got back from Jon’s doctor’s appointment, the one about his liver, and I took a hot, stupid, mid-morning nap on top of the covers and with my little dog between my legs, her favorite place to sleep. Was it comfortable? No. I had sequins on and big flashy earrings. All the material from my jeans somehow managed to bunch up between my legs. My dog was bristly like the hairbrush my mother made me use for well over a decade, the pink one that was passed down to me after my sister left the home.
Yes, I had to use my grown sister’s hairbrush when she moved out of the house. If that doesn’t prove to you that I’m the product of Depression- and Dust Bowl-era Oklahomans, nothing will.
See, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl made my mother frugal. I get it. I do. But seriously, who keeps a hairbrush around that long, washing it every month in the sink like it was going to the spa, rescuing it from various dogs’ mouths and returning it to my drawer covered in an ever-lengthening tactile Morse-like Code of tooth marks? (Maybe that would make it Braille-like. Who cares.)
I didn’t even know people could buy hairbrushes until I was seventeen and saw them at the store. Don’t ask how I never saw them before then. I have attention differences, and my mother probably steered me away from the expensive beauty aisles, especially after my father died and we were trying to make it on her income from the state mental hospital, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse for thirty-five years.
Anyway, at the store back in those days, I was always busy taking the empty glass Coke bottles in to get our deposit back or to buy some cigarettes — if you can even call menthol Virginia Slims that — for my mother. I never saw any hairbrushes until the day I did as a teenager and my mind was blown. I bought one on the spot. A Goodie.
I confronted my mother about the decades-long hairbrush ruse when I got home. She just shrugged or something, then probably took a sip of her vodka, then took a drag of her cigarette, and clicked the clicker to watch the news, something she loved to do because she was passionate about politics. She was a feverish democrat who was in the closet about her political opinions until my father died, then she let it all loose. She’d call all her nurse friends when anything remotely of political interest happened, like the time Reagan came to town and two kids sneaked a big protest sign into the rally.
I know the kids who did that. I wasn’t one of them, sadly. I still had a perm and claw bangs and listened to Duran Duran. I had no desire to tape parts of a sign to my body so I could smuggle them into a room full of adults, then assemble the sign once I was inside. I didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t want to be dragged anywhere. I had Guess jeans. I had a Coach purse. I was going places in my jelly shoes.
The point is. I took a shit nap, but it was still a nap, and I’m grateful for it.
I’m still pretty violently ill. I have a five-hour training tomorrow as a substitute teacher with ESS, who recently hired me. ESS handles subs for numerous states, including Utah, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. I might be able to use ESS to claw my way out of this state. (And of course I love teaching.) I may have to reschedule the training if things continue to go the way they’re going now.
Listen, all I want is the ease my childhood hairbrush knew. I want to lie in soapy, hot water whiling away my time staring at the nicotine-stained plaster ceiling, not a thought in my bristles, not a pain in my handle. Is that too much to ask? For a little time like that?
That brush. On brush-washing day, I remember having to comb all my hair out of it as my mother ordered. I remember being told to dry it off with a towel. I remember having to position it so it could air dry in the sun streaming through the bathroom window before it went back into the drawer.
That brush was my mother’s favorite child. It’s so obvious. Coddle, coddle, love, love. Hugs and kisses, little brush.
I want this acute health situation to be about bad spinach, mild food poisoning, but the evidence — shared by me last night in the second installment in this series—suggests something more is going on, as always. Maybe if I just don’t eat between now and tomorrow’s training, I’ll be OK. This is the same approach I’ve used as a workaround in the recent past that’s contributed to my losing more and more and more weight.
Conversely, eating more and more and more when violently ill won’t result in my absorbing any calories or nutrients, as they’ll just … ahem … shoot through me like Big Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine used in Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project. Except it won’t be like Big Bertha at all, because she got stuck for two years starting in 2013 and eventually had to be partially excavated for a repair to solve the issue. Trust me, nothing’s getting stuck inside me and nobody is going to cut into me to bring my body the spare parts it needs to operate properly again.
So to eat, or not to eat, that is the question. To train, or not to train. I guess there are actually two questions at this point.
I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.
This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.
I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.
I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.
My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.
My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.
A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:
Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!
Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.
The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.1 Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.
The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!3 Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.
And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.3
But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?
She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?
Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?
Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?
That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.
The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.
Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.
My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.4
(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)
I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.
Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.
—
Margarine During War
Women keep settling (oleo, factory jobs) though they pine for sex the way they long for butter on their lips.
After war, they dab eye shadow and rouge for men whose war-whores didn’t teach them to kiss.
But the women hoist skirts, drop stockings, for soon the bread they’d break would be kissed with butter (real butter).
Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
Last night I slept as well as I’ve ever slept. I woke up at one point just long enough to think Oh God I’m sleepy! Could I sleep any better than this, ever? before falling asleep again.
But now that I’m up, my head feels like a bowling ball. How much does this thing weigh anyhow?
I just looked it up: about 12 pounds. That is a lot of weight for my delicate neck to manage. No wonder I have tight shoulders and suffer from neck pain. No wonder my trapeziuses are overdeveloped and make me look slightly freakish with my shirt off. (And yes, trapeziuses is the plural form of the word trapezius. I looked that up, too.)
My shades are closed because I still want to inhabit the small domain of my house for a while longer before acknowledging that the world extends beyond my doors, windows and walls.
I can tell it’s out there even without seeing it. Birds twitter and cackle. I just heard the shrill reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of someone’s scooter trying to make it up our hill. The street’s incline is so steep that it always taxes underpowered vehicles and makes them sound like wind-up toys.
Now I hear a small airplane rattling its way from somewhere to somewhere else.
If I were to tell you what the world consists of based solely on what I hear, I would say there are scads of birds, a scooter and a single plane. Wait, there go two cars. Add two cars to the list. The world is growing larger with each moment.
Now it’s silent. The world, for the moment, is empty.
Even with the shades closed, I can tell it’s cloudy and will probably rain. What little light comes through the blinds is as diffuse and gray as the sky. I hate it when the sky holds the sun hostage this way, blanketing it in dark wool as if its rays need to be dampened for our protection.
This is another reason I am reluctant to look outside. I know we’re in for about six months of this nonsense, and I am not ready to acknowledge it: sky whose color ranges from wet cement to drying cement to freshly dried cement, mountains obscured by clouds that try but fail to mimic the shape of mountains, everything running for cover from rain that’s not even heavy enough to earn the label rain—more like the effect produced by the Wham-O Fun Fountain I had as a child than anything wondrous or natural.
How I long for Midwestern thunderstorms, the way light and sound move through everything. I want a storm that shakes my windowpanes and rises through my feet. I want rain with rhythm and intensity. I want an unapologetic downpour, not its inferior substitute, drizzle.
Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.
Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.
This is how night should come, I thought.
Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.
But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.
The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.
Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”
This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.
Yes, it should come just like this.
Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.
But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.
and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
Dana Henry Martin 