Dear Fiona Landers,
I need your help coping with a new normal.
Nine months ago I stupidly cut my finger doing an odd job around the house which ended up with me getting 3 pretty sweet stitches, a tetanus shot, and some gnarly antibiotics. I’ll spare you the gory details but let’s just say since my mishap my stomach has never been the same.
After the 4th month of my bathroom being my new best friend, I went to the doctor, and then another doctor…and another…and another. Turns out doctors are my new best friends! I’ve finally been diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disorder, a digestive system disorder, and a possible auto-immune disorder I may have had my whole life but never knew about. My accident is the gift that keeps on giving!
Now as I come to terms with my new “normal”, the crazy diets, the medications, the supplements, the life style change, and the unknown long road ahead, I have come to find that a piece of myself that once was might have been lost in the madness.
I used to be creative and things that used to bring me joy don’t really do it for me anymore. The world was my oyster! What happened? It’s as if my life has been on pause. Now everything seems bleak and I’m worried I’ll never get back to my old self. I’ve had 32 great years but I can’t imagine this cloud following me for the next 32 and beyond, god willing. Can you help me? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Yours truly,
Overwhelmed Bathroom Girl
Dear Overwhelmed Bathroom Girl,
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel of light I saw when I woke up during my first colonoscopy. Stranded in a sea of beeps and tubes and paper gowns and plastic gloves, I blinked my eyelids half-mast. There it was on the monitor. A never-ending flesh maze infused with cavernous lantern light. Oh, I thought, a gnome must be giving a tour. As I gazed at the apricot vinyl tunnel, the mystery of life suddenly became obvious and I needed to tell everyone. I gasped, and then shouted, “Rit-crssfrmnel-gharnorrb!”
Sadly, the anesthesiologist refused to leave my drug levels set to “oracle.” He didn’t even transcribe my manifesto before knocking me out completely. Tough town. I can’t relay the divine wisdom I stumbled upon during that first dope n’ scope, because I’ve forgotten what I found out, and I’ve never risen during the bevy of colonoscopies I’ve had since.
The truth is, I don’t know what to say, even though long haul toilet diseases are unfortunately my wheelhouse. I could use this letter to tell you exactly how it’s made everything in my life harder. And it has. Everything. Especially because I’ve never financially qualified for good, or even humane health insurance. Everyone went gaga for the polyp in Ryan Reynolds’ ass when he got a PR colonoscopy—well Ryan, I recently had a polyp removed from my ass too and you know what? That was a fun little vacation for my ass compared to her prior surgeries. Even if the surgical center where I had the polypectomy was an apocalyptic hell wing named after a comedian who is a bad person. Tough town.
I think the light you’re looking for is the same light Joni Mitchell saw when she was nine years old. When her name was Roberta Joan Anderson and her body was twisted and frozen with polio in an isolation trailer, a hundred miles from home. It was coming on Christmas. Her mother, Myrtle, visited. Just once. Masked and trembling, Myrtle tossed a little Christmas tree into Joni’s polio trailer and skedaddled.
The nurses allowed Joni to leave the string lights on her bedside Christmas tree illuminated an hour after light’s-out, for the duration of her long hospital stay. In this hallowed hour, Joni would belt Christmas carols at the top of her lungs to drown out the whir of the iron lungs next door. She communed with this tree. Confided in it. Made deals with it. When the doctor told her she wouldn’t walk again, she vowed to the tree she would. Sometimes people never walk again, and it’s not because they didn’t believe or try hard enough. This is a cruel narrative. Not walking again is just as triumphant as walking again. Joni did walk again. She did it alone, in excruciating pain, as a little kid. With fuck off tenacity, scalding rags on her besieged body, by the light of her sacred Christmas tree.
Her body dragged the wreckage of polio with her for the rest of her life. One of her permanent injuries included a severe weakening in the muscles of her left hand, making it impossible to play traditional chords on the guitar. Because of this limitation, she researched different jazz tunings and embarked on a harmonic archeological dig. With alchemical intuition and a hunger for innovation, she invented new chords and her signature, disparate tunings. She conjured a singular musical realm. A symphonic wilderness, all her own. Joni says she sings her sorrow and paints her joy.
I think of Joni Mitchell and Frida Kahlo strapped into their tiny hospital beds, painting in their heads. Frida contracted polio at six years old. She was bedridden for nine months. The muscles in her right leg atrophied but she still played sports with boys. She decided she’d be a doctor, and until a streetcar accident mangled her eighteen-year-old body, violently derailing the trajectory of her life, she was on track to become one. Instead, she became a thrilling, immortal painter, making everyone else’s paintings look like cream of wheat.
I don’t write this to glorify the suffering of these two stone cold fox polio babes or to push some subversive art agenda on you. You aren’t required to make painful art and they both actually were, and are, not very suffery to me, considering what Frida lived with and what Joni continues to live through. I glorify their pluck. Their art is visceral and emotional, but not entirely miserable. Not unlike their lives. Frida loved parties and Revlon “Everything’s Rosy” lipstick and red-hot sex. Speaking of red, she banged Trotsky and I’ll never get over that. Joni said she came out of the hospital “a dancer,” wriggling and ponying like a bobby soxer demon at the YMCA. Their veins pulsed kelly green, they bruised in crimson, and embodied midnight or cobalt blue, depending on the hour. They were miserable, but also fun, and I think you too can accomplish this.
I didn’t wake up during my most recent colonoscopy, but I did have an awakening before they put me under. As I lay in the fetal position, nearly ass to ass with Martha, an eighty-six-year-old woman having cataract surgery in the wrong eye because they mixed up the paperwork, I thought, What if I died in the Chevy Chase Surgical Center? This thought both destroyed and venerated me. I was in hell. I was in Glendale. But the devil would not, Chevy could not, pry my spirit from my body. I am my own exorcist.
Martha and I had become close in the sticky purgatory of the waiting room. We became close because she needed me. I mean she really did need me. Transportation had been provided for her, but once she was dumped into the mouth of the Chevy Chase, Martha was on her own. She had a walker, the kind with the tennis balls on the bottom, and a giant purse she couldn’t see. She couldn’t stand, walk, or see on her own, but was expected to secure a seat, report to the front desk, fill out paperwork, find her insurance card in the whale’s mouth of her purse, and survive until her name was called. I physically and administratively assisted Martha to the best of my ability. I was delirious. Pale and starving from my gross colonoscopy prep-day, my dehydration prolonged by the three hour wait added to my appointment time. Like I said, I think they did the wrong eye, but she clearly needed both, so I figured she’d either get the next one or die.
The epiphany I had, as I smelled Martha’s retina being cauterized, was that I loved Martha. There was a cloudy love-light static in her burnished eyes and I was awake just enough to be blinded by it. I could die in the belly of the Chevy with Martha and still be all right. Tennessee Williams once said—perhaps just before whispering “get that ass!” to Gore Vidal, upon seeing a pre-presidential JFK in his Bermuda shorts—“The fact that we continue to fall in love with people and ideas and places is not evidence of our cupidity or our dumbness, but our strength. When we love--really love--in any way, we are announcing to the world that we intend to survive.”
My senior dog is developing the same scrambled love-light in her eyes. Two searchlights, beams of loyal Payne's gray, casing the room for me. Devotional love on an abstract plane. I think, Overwhelmed BRG, your tunnel light is in you, around you, and here. Even if it’s the light you’re inventing to survive. I think you don’t have to reinvent the wheel but maybe you do. Maybe you need to gently, or at least neutrally, allow yourself the time and space to conjure the strange and beautiful alternate tunings of your life.
I believe the missing piece of you is not missing, but floating, on a flamingo raft in one of the lagoons in you. An unflappable heroine who’s got nothing but time and is only on your side. I know you have it in you to endure the bleak sting of unflattering hospital floodlighting as much as you have it in you to be enraptured by the blue hour on some precious, ordinary evening. You might start seeing gradations of light in new ways altogether. Your eyes may open to the kaleidoscopic hues reserved only for hummingbirds, and humans, when they are irresponsibly in love. You might start noticing the light that is so freely given but mostly overlooked.
Like the light you now recognize in certain Christmas trees. There it is, you think. Joni’s holy night light. You clock the asymmetry of the branches and see young Frida Kahlo, incandescent, limping toward her prismatic destiny. You realize the asymmetry of the tree is not a mistake. It’s a devotional image. A retablo.
xo
Fiona Landers
As ever, you bring strength and humor as you discuss life's travails. And encouragement- so much encouragement in a not sappy way.