Story #1 The Symptoms, The First Beginning

Let me tell you a story...

It is spring, 2022. The year could have been any other year, except it isn't. It's this year and you are twenty-eight. You are at the Masters program you have wanted, and spent years dreaming, to attend. You feel that life is about to start, that everything before this may have just been a rehearsal. You are full of optimism and hope. Your true life, so long awaited, so ardently imagined, is about to begin. At last. But that is not the whole truth. The truth is that you are far away from all that feels like home, in a small remote American town, far away from anyone or anything that is familiar. The truth is you are exhausted. The truth is you are stressed. The truth is you are alone.

It begins all at once. Is how it seems at first. Except that everything has a beginning long before it actually begins. And those pre-beginnings, those ineffable starts, were this: stomach pains. But you are in a Masters program and in this particular small American town drinking seems to be the only available past time, so you blame the beer. You blame beer. You drink maybe 3-6 beers a week. And you think that is what is making your stomach hurt, bloat, feel like a rock. But it is not.

That was the first sign. Small. Irritable. Not insurmountable. Small enough to ignore. And anyway, are you not at grad school? Are you not supposed to be socializing, making friends, meeting people? Beer isn't great for you. You know this. You don't even particularly love beer, but in the ramshackle (and that's being kind) despair of the rundown bars your peers attend is the only beverage they serve. You should slow down. And you do. In fact, you stop drinking all together.

Winter break. A near death experience occurs (another story). Family stress. Skiing long hours. Conflict. Stress.

You are back. Grad school: semester two. You are jet-lagged. You are tired. Stomach pains continue. Then it becomes March. Spring break. Your face starts to swell.

Symptom #1: your face starts to swell. And you don't know why.

For spring break you travel to a small coastal town: sun, agave, the Pacific. You go out for tacos and afterward your stomach hurts as it has never hurt before. You stagger back to the hotel, bent over, thinking maybe you really need to go to the hospital, maybe your appendix burst, maybe worse. The pain feels abnormal. Your stomach bloats to a full 9-months pregnant type of situation, and you barely make it back to the hotel, but then you do. The pain is not fully gone by next morning. When you speak to your friend you guess it may be lactose intolerance manifesting with considerable delay, now, as you are twenty-eight. You know that American dairy is frequently more troublesome than European (Europe, where you're from), so you avoid dairy for the rest of Spring break. But the stomach problems persist.

In the mirror you do not look like yourself. There is a layer of swelling on your face that effaces the cheekbones and whatever natural slenderness your face usually possessed. The swelling now makes it into something strange. Your whole body though—your whole body looks as if you've gained weight. (Symptom #2: full body water retention/swelling) But it is not fat. You know because you've have had several bodily adventures and you are usually able to tell when you start to put on weight, rather than see it all at once manifest as you are seeing it now. You reprimand yourself: stop overeating. You become cruel. Far, far crueler than this: You fat monster. You disgusting thing. You can't bear to look at yourself. Take another picture, you say as you give the camera away. It is so beautiful here, in Encinitas. The red sun delves into the slow carpet-like unfolding procession of the tides: red into blue, and you cannot bear it. Agonized by what is happening to you. And as far as you can tell then: nothing is happening to you. It is your fault. It is your fault. It is all your fault.

Bear it.

You do not know what this is, even though around the narrow edges of the brutalizing voice there is another, a fainter, subtler voice—and it is saying: something is beginning, something terrible is happening to you.

This is the beginning of crisis.

This is the first week in which the symptoms become undeniable. Your past self, the self you assumed you were disappears, and you feel like you've awoken in a strange body, been kidnapped into fairytale logic, turned into a werewolf at night, for the swelling is worst in the morning. You feel like Gregor Samsa: you've been turned into a vermin. You used to be human and now you're something else. That is to say: you used to be yourself, now you're not.

What are you? What is happening?

This is a blog about things falling apart. And things are now falling apart.

You see the world, agonizingly beautiful and you cannot touch it. You begin to feel other to it. You begin to resent yourself, as if, as if, it is you who is causing this. As if it is within your will and within your power to make this swelling, this stomach pain go away.

It is necessary to point out that back then you did not see a link between the swelling and the stomach pain. Back then you were too preoccupied by silently abusing yourself for carelessly gaining weight, after you had been in the best shape of your life the past winter. What a disaster.

You return to your Masters program, to grad school, and its snow-laden, lead-like small American town. You pass twenty-four casinos on your drive to class. Your classmates make this out to be quaint, cute, amusing. You see: addiction, power abuse, poverty. It makes you feel extraordinarily sad. You bite your tongue.

By the time classes end you cannot fit into any of your jeans, so you wear dresses. It is May. You are swollen every day. You do not resemble yourself. And you can't figure it out for the life of you why. There is no trigger—like food, or a material, or a chemical. You feel ashamed. You feel inwardly vexed. Tossed into a battle between your own body and your own self. The self you have known yourself to be. But now—now, what is this? What is happening? Nothing you try makes the swelling go away. Not cutting gluten, not cutting dairy, not eating less. Your face appears disfigured in the mornings, and the swelling goes down slightly as the day goes on. But it never completely disappears. Your face is swelling and you don't know why. Why is my face swelling? You want and do not scream.

You walk around like an unstitched wound, ashamed, raw, bleeding pain. Soundlessly screaming. You do what you always do when you are in extraordinary pain: you deal with it alone.

And so you torture yourself. Endlessly struggle with an invincible opponent.

The semester ends. You are full of shame at how you look, full of contempt, you can do nothing about it, and you worry you will stay like this forever, that you will never be your true self ever again. You fear you have flown too close to the sun. You fear this is some retribution for getting dangerously close to the things you wanted.

The things you thought you wanted.