How to feel better

A ghost story

There was a list I made, in the height of COVID lockdown in May of 2020, nestled in between long catalogues of to-do items in my planner, that I titled “How to feel better.” I underlined the title, drew a heart next to it. And then I wrote:

It’s not coincidence that most of the list — workout, walk, sing, stretch, make out, and even, I’d argue, “practice uke” — were bodily endeavors. Part of why I wanted to “feel better” in the first place was because I could feel a familiar ghostliness setting in: a sort of distance between me and the world, a disconnect between me and me, a feeling that I was floating just a millimeter above my body observing my own performance. Robina was doing everything she should, which is to say, she was spending most of her energy and efforts projecting a bubble of steady, safe energy around her. She was making things okay for her kids, setting out long rolls of paper on her kitchen table to doodle on, keeping them well fed with groceries she stood in lines for hours to procure, soothing her newly teenaged daughter’s nightly tears about missing her friends and her newfound independence and addressing unanswerable questions about when those things would return. Robina was on zoom calls reassuring clients about their own resilience when they wept about how this wasn’t the world they expected to bring their babies into, and standing forehead to forehead with laboring people from behind one of her three donated N-95s — even as she was also obsessively wiping down surfaces and taking off her clothes outside her house, as if it could undo their hot breath on her cheeks as they desperately held onto her neck — and answering more unanswerable questions. But despite projecting that bubble of safety, Robina — just barely, so subtly it would have been imperceptible to anyone but her — was also going to a familiar place she had learned to go when she was not safe, when unsafe things were happening to her. Which is to say, in the language of trauma specialists and your favorite IG therapy memes, a disassociated space.

So she made a list, one that could have also been called, “how to feel less like a ghost.”

*****

There is no other way to describe the current moment other than to say that we are living through a coordinated terror attack from the powers that be. All of that has been unleashed — attacks on trans rights; ICE raids; communications freezes at federal agencies like the CDC, FDA, and NIH; tariffs; nazi salutes; withdrawing from the WHO; threatening to annex Gaza; and on and on and on and on — is done so in an attempt to flood us, to overload us so much so that our ability to process and respond is compromised. To encourage us to numb out. Israel’s onslaught of Gaza the had a similar ethos: destruction for destruction’s sake, but also for terror’s sake, for encouraging people to turn the other way simply because they cannot bear to watch. It is a tactic calculated to leave us disassociated and protecting ourselves from despair and hopelessness by not feeling at all. That encourages us to feel untethered to the world; as if we do not make it and it does not make us. As if all that happens is someone else’s problem, some mythical person from the future we can’t imagine, even as they very well might be people we meet: our own children, our children’s children. We are encouraged to ignore them, to disassociate from the reality being thrust upon them, these opposites of ghosts.

*****

I came down with the flu on January 13th. It was a week before the inauguration and the night after I had attended a birth. The baby had been born quickly; I didn’t make it. The placenta took its time. The dad fed us pistachio croissants in between directing the window repairmen who he had forgotten were scheduled to show up that morning. And that night, as I curled up in bed, I began to shake so violently Andy needed to lay almost on top of me to get the trembling to settle enough for me to fall asleep. I woke up with a fever and body aches so bad I could have wept if I had the energy. Looking at my phone was impossible; none of the letters made sense. I begged Wren to take the baby, offered to pay her. I did not get up, except to pee twice, for 10 hours. Later that night, as I laid in bed listening to my kids and husband chatting animatedly on the other side of the door to my bedroom, I convinced myself I had died and was haunting them. “Am I ghost?” I asked Andy when he came in to check on me and offer me food.

As someone who usually bounces back from illness quickly, I was stunned by how long recovery from the flu took. I was desperately tired for two weeks afterwards: a bone crushing, sleep 12 hours a night kind of exhaustion worse than the bone-building depletion of the first trimester. The exhaustion was likely compounded by the the fact that I ended up at another birth exactly a week after the first, several days after my fever broke and when I was starting to feel slightly less acutely terrible but a 3 mile walk to the art store with the kids still drained me beyond my comprehension. This second birth happened in a snowstorm, and I made it before the baby arrived, but just by a half an hour. “I don’t think I like labor,” my client confessed. “I don’t think anyone likes it til it’s over,” I responded.

Maybe it was the forced slowness of the flu, or maybe it’s that it’s winter, or maybe it’s just that I remember the last time too well — the frenzy, the breathlessness, the constant strategizing and protesting of winter 2017 — but I have spent the last few weeks consciously resisting being flooded. Although it would never be in character for me to ignore the terrors, and I haven’t, I have felt myself instinctively moving toward certain outlets and not others to stay appraised. In particular, I have been turning away from social media like Instagram, with its breaking news and hot takes and meme-ification. It’s a platform I’ve used for writing for years and yet somehow, in this moment, my brain is not speaking the language it requires. I cannot think in short catchy soundbytes and exacting, beautiful turns of phrases, not right now. Right now my brain feels like a seedling germinating under snow. What will bloom? Or, more importantly, what is the right seed to germinate? I do not yet know what this present moment requires, but I do know I want to generate and not simply react. I do not want to do what it is expected or what I have already done. I do not want to return to the tactics I already tried, as though I’m being haunted by something I can’t escape.

Image via Aike Ananda Art

****

In retrospect, my list in April of 2020 was a quaint list. A simple list of simple, easily accessed pleasures. Less than a year after I made it, I could have made another miles longer and unequivocally more labor intensive, because in the fall of 2020 I ended up attending some of the most traumatic births of my life, and in their wake I was left battling panic attacks for the first time in my life, followed by my first COVID infection (which I also contracted, masked, at a birth), then a weeks-long episode of insomnia so extreme sometimes I was only sleeping 6 minutes out of every 24 hours (“micro-naps” was a term I didn’t know until the torture of this episode; that the answer to “can you die of insomnia?” is yes was another). It’s still unclear to me whether that episode could be attributed to some long-COVID attack on my nervous system, or simply the result of both chronic and acute PTSD that was compounded by the circadian disruptions and, also, trauma of contracting COVID as a healthcare provider who had managed to avoid it for almost an entire year just days before I was due for my first vaccine. By 2021 my list would have included, in addition to the above, a half dozen herbs and supplements, rigid circadian rhythm practices (strict wake up and sleep times; walks/movement at certain times of day; eating on a schedule; sun on my eyes immediately upon waking; blue blockers and low lights starting at dusk; specific bedtime routines, and so on); regular acupuncture; cold dips in the ocean, regimented workout schedules, “grounding” every morning, and on and on: all things I continued until Hanif was born and much of it became inaccessible again (though, blessedly, I had recovered enough by then that losing those practices did not destroy my health).

The period where I was at the height of my insomnia is eerily devoid of pictures except for the occasional cemetery sculptures.

In the depths of those insomnia days, I did not feel like a ghost; I was a ghost. I dutifully did the things I was supposed to. I got out of the bed where I had not slept and swallowed the bitter traditional Chinese herbs I had been prescribed and took long walks in the cemetery around the corner from my house in the morning hoping the early morning sun and movement would help me sleep the next night. I attended prenatal visits and smiled warmly. I attended births and sat on my hands when I was supposed to and leapt into activity when I was supposed to. I took my kids to homeschool groups and read them stories at night as if we were all about to go to sleep. But I peered at the funerary statues in the same cemetery I walked around hundreds of times before unable to make any sense of them, and I could not feel the warmth of my smile spread through my body, and I would stare at the horizon as the sun set at those homeschool meetups and feel a cold chasm of emptiness in my chest where my heart should be. At night, when everyone but me and Andy were asleep, the ghosts in me would howl, scream to be noticed, weep and claw at the walls in despair. “I’m trapped,” they would say, over and over. “I’m trapped, I’m trapped.”

“You’re safe,” Andy would say, but as a ghost I could not believe him. I had, already, after all, died.

*****

This is not a “how to feel better” list. We are, as a nation, haunted by our ghosts. Ghosts of terror, and enslavement, of torture and rape and genocide and theft and exploitation. And no lists of “read / practice uke / workout / puzzles with kids / take a walk / write / sing / stretch / make out” is going to solve that for us. But, in a dying empire that would just as soon ground our bones to dust in its frenzied, snarling descent, it is worth tending to the bodies and hearts that might outlive it, that might build something better. I don’t mean to say I think joy is resistance. I do mean to say that if we are to resist we must survive, and pleasure is a necessary part of survival. Pleasure, I would argue, is also a precondition for imagining, one of the nutrients in the soil that nurtures tender shoots to break through the blanket of snow.

These days, I’m allowing my brain to feel slow, to trust its pace and its gentle unfurling as I try to make sense of all that is being unleashed. I am reading by booklight as I nurse my baby to sleep — 8 books already this year — and writing long things that may or may not ever be held in other people’s hands and taking the time to do potentially frivolous things like make playlists, playlists like I used to when I was a teen, playlists with names and meticulously ordered songs unlike the way I usually haphazardly add songs to quarterly playlists named after the seasons. I am taking the time to connect with friends and ground myself in relationship, inviting people over for dinner spontaneously and bringing them chicken soup when they have the flu. I am making sure there is always chai on the stove. I am daydreaming about ways to expand and connect the disparate communities I have already built, seeing what they can build together. I am resisting the urge to judge my own slowness, my own uncharacteristic refusal to jump! into! action!. I am letting myself imagine. I am not being washed away by the things that would have me consumed. I am planting my feet down slowly, slowly, slowly, letting them sink into the snow, letting them take root, insisting I am of this place and I belong in its future. I am refusing to be a ghost.

Let’s get a collective list going! How are you tending to your heart and body this long dark winter? I’ve been meaning to activate the chat for some time now, so that more of you can connect with each other, and now seems like the perfect opportunity to start:

And here’s the link to that playlist I made when I was recovering from flu: