Respecting My Ill Body

It’s been several years since my body fought the inner war of bacteria and T-cells. Since Friday I’ve barely been able to eat, drink, and stand for prolonged periods. While I’m finally on the mend and able to keep down soup and plain rice, it’s been challenging to accept that my body needed care.

I know my mind needs care, but I’m considerably harder on my body. I want it to do all the things I expect it to do and then some. Jackhammer granite in the summer heat? Done. Sprint several hundred yards during tournament games? I inhaled the agony. I’ll deal with physical pain in the pursuit of something external, but ask me to care for my body when it’s the main project? Hell no. I’d rather do something while feeling like death than wallow under the covers in acceptance of my frailty.

That said, I didn’t get to bettering my mental health by ignoring the needs of my body. So, rather begrudgingly, over the years I’ve given myself more and more permission to just be sick when I am. This idea goes against nearly every lesson I learned about sickness after turning eleven.

Several teachers, coaches, mentors, and older folks not-so-subtly instructed me that physical sickness was more of a moral failing. More than once adults, who had presumably been ill before, told me that I could shake off whatever was stuffing up my throat with a bit of orange juice and a can-do attitude. Before my age hit the double-digits, recovering from sickness was a normal fact of life. My mom stuck me in an oatmeal bath when I caught the chicken pox. Soup was prepared. Life slowed. Yet just before my teenage years, it became less and less acceptable for my autoimmune system to take precedence over other obligations.

A coach once told me that sickness was no excuse for missing a practice. I think the only excuse for missing a practice was a death in the family (more on the implications of this kind of mentality in a future post). A teacher gave an entire class a diatribe about the laziness of another student who had missed several days with an unspecified medical problem. How their missing class impacted our learning I will never understand, but the message of sickness equaling indolence was cemented more and more with these supposedly wise adult messages.

I internalized these ideas and continued with them into college and the working world. They impacted my thinking about my depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Nothing could ever be paused. I was assaulted by shame in those moments where I had to call my boss and say I couldn’t work. Fortunately, I’ve had understanding bosses but until my last hospitalization in 2019, it always felt wrong to stop what I was doing to get better. Far better, it seemed, to do crap work and extend my illness than it was to pause, get healthy, and return to knocking out exceptional work.

Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I’m compelled to agree with him. The most common advice I give to young people and their guardians is to stop whatever it is they are doing and evaluate how they are. Astonishingly, many have no idea how to do this. They’re too inured to the system that stepping outside of it for a moment is too foreign to even think about. In my Mental Agility Workshops I teach different ways to read the body — meditation, body scans, breathing exercises, balance exercises. All to get people to check in with themselves. To see how much gas is really in their tank, and that it is probably time for some refueling. This is becoming more and more necessary as young people look around and see just how many of their friends are completely wore out with nothing but pressure coming down on them from adults.

The last time I was this sick was over two years ago. Even then I was still stubborn about getting back to my life, which is why I learned to outsource that decision. I don’t make the call on going back to work — I make a case to my family. Instead of bullying myself into feeling better and probably returning before I’m healthy enough because I can brow-beat myself into anything, I tell my girlfriend and my sister how I’m better. This not only ensures that I really am over the hump (far harder to fool two other people instead of just me), but it also deepens connection.

Illness is a solitary affair, but it needn’t be. Adults turned it into once since before I reached my teens, but this global pandemic has, I think, forced everyone to acknowledge our individual frailty while demonstrating that we have better odds surviving when we add in the support of those we care about.