Illustration Team Macho

Our lives might be written on our bodies, but we don’t always notice.

I didn’t fully appreciate how happily banal most of my Tuesday afternoons are until I spent a recent one topless, ice-cold and sniffling on an examining table, with a too-attractive doctor pressing electrodes onto my chest, arms and legs for an EKG, just after I had redefined “sobbing uncontrollably” while listing my symptoms, and then again when she asked me if there was anything I might be upset about.

After an intense week of above-average life stress, coupled with serious partying (film festival-related, mostly, but also just due to the vortex of smoking and drinking that I fell into after doing a lot of smoking and drinking), I was feeling my heart in a new way. It was thudding: not fast, not slow, but loud. For days, I’d stop to feel my pulse and wonder if the audible pounding and the oppressive weight I felt on my chest and my strange, shallow breathing were normal. Then it was 3am and I was saying that I hadn’t done coke in “like, forever” to the Telehealth nurse, and that I’m not a smoker except for at parties or when I drink red wine or am on deadline, obviously. The next day, the usually boring Tuesday, I spent an unhinged morning at work using half-remembered yoga breathing to try and slow my heartbeat, and then left for the hospital, pretty sure that I would die on the way.

Turns out, nothing’s wrong. Likely a panic attack, I was told, but a long one. Touching the little burst of cotton and tape on my arm where blood was drawn, I shuffled home in a rare, raw state of self-indulgent vulnerability. Something had shifted, come undone. My body had betrayed me. Or, I had betrayed my body. Either way, our truce was over. I still felt like shit, and that night took a titan of a sleeping pill and woke up 12 hours later with the lights still on.

Aside from the usual scrapes and broken bones, I’ve been generally healthy, and my bodily well-being has never felt as suddenly and immediately threatened. The diseases and accidents and malfunctions that have afflicted some not-old people that I know have been horrific but random, seemingly separate from the everyday machinations of their bodies. Isn’t that what youth offers: some assurance that we can fuck randomly, jump off of tall things, inebriate ourselves into temporary comas and use pharmaceuticals just because with no consequences other than a grouchy day of pizza and jammies? It’s an implicit promise, one that works out great until it doesn’t anymore. It’s only then that those Lululemon jerks, asleep at 10pm after doing their smug little workouts, make sense.

Unchecked young-and-dumb fun isn’t the primary way we use and abuse our bodies, though. These fleshy carcasses we possess are the closest and most accessible venue for dealing with emotional events. In addition to the dramatic physical manifestations that come with addictions to dope, vodka, stranger-sex and cupcakes, it’s the more basic and common strains of anxiety and alienation that get all over us, and often without us noticing. My emo-ness about my family, my friends and my work existed only vaguely in my consciousness but, somehow, my body knew.

I’m not the only idiot who doesn’t notice that something is wrong until I’m bawling, head and crushed-up snotty Kleenex in hands, in a painfully bright doctor’s office. The incidence of SSRI use, social anxiety, exhaustion and creeping depression experienced by my friends and familiars suggests a lot of comically disconnected relationships among our intellects, our feelings and our physical selves, especially in those of us who are inclined to problematize and narcissize the most mundane kinds of life-trouble. Our bodies are our allies and our enemies, being acted on and acting out what our mind-grapes can’t handle. One of my girlfriends manages stress by meticulously grooming herself: when her nails are long and perfectly painted, something is up. I get tattooed when I feel boring and too safe. And, apparently, my body gets back at me for the emotional unrest I’m ignoring by fucking with the thoracic machinery to send a message. And ultimately, I know that it, the physical, has the final say.

An occasional and short-lived panic attack is one thing, which I’ve experienced periodically as random, swirling nausea, cured in a day with some rest and an Ativan. But, hammering anxiety that lasts for a full week because of the tricky, chronic problems that sent me tearing through open bars and packs of Belmonts in the first place, is what I believe squares consider a “wake-up call.” The “it’s nothing” of my diagnosis might clear my heart of any wrongdoing, but it doesn’t clear my head.

» Tell me about your body betrayals. Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or Tweet @katecarraway.

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