Read from the start.
I remember the first time I threw up from m—
I remember the first time I threw up from—
No I have to change the name again. I’ve been writing this blog post for two weeks now, and—
From now on,
medifatewill be referred to as “membrin”.No, “mentis”.
No, “cushion”.
I remember the first time I threw up from taking cushion—
No no no maybe it’s not the word. Maybe it’s just the memory.
I remember thinking “Oh, this has changed now.”
For better and worse, the sickness wasn’t just in my head anymore. No, it was also in my toilet. Disgusting.
And yes, every single week, I puked the morning after taking the pills. So of course, I contacted the hospital again, and they prescribed me— they got my GP to prescribe me anti sickness pills. But they didn’t work and—
Let’s talk about what it means for something to be “in your head”.
What does it mean for something to be “in your head”?
In some ways, everything is in your head. All of your lived experience and perception of the world is only real to you because it goes through your head.
That screen you’re looking at right now, yes, this one. It’s in your head. The screen (or screenreader) you’re reading (or listening to) this blog post on, is— it’s real to you, it exists, because you can imagine it in your head.
It also exists in the “real world”, maybe in your hand or your desk, or the room somewhere. But you can only sense that because it’s in your head. By holding it in your head, firmly in your mind’s eye, you can start to piece together where something is, what it is, what it’s like.
Is memory real? It’s in your head. It’s in your head, and not anywhere else, it doesn’t exist anywhere else. It doesn’t exist in the outside world, not anymore! But that doesn’t mean it’s not still real.
Things don’t have to exist in the “real world” to be real. It can exist in your head and nowhere else.
Of course, other people may share the same memory as you. There could be some overlap with yours and theirs that lets you piece together the truth of reality, of history. Or you could use forensics, archaeology, deduction, whatever it is, to determine the facts.
What really happened? And when? And to whom?
“Elementary, my dear Wilson. We can determine if a memory is real or not by examining the facts.”
But… “what really happened” is not the same thing as “a memory”. They are separate things. One is a history, and one is a story. One exists outside, and one exists within, as a subjective feeling. Is a memory any less real because of that?
A memory is far more than a play-by-play. For example, let’s look at a very simple example.
First, a piece of history:
Lu held their head over the toilet and puked.
And second, the resultant memory:
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.
Do you see the difference now?
When I was a toddler, I loved milk.
I LOVED IT.
I used to drink it every day, with every meal, with every snack, as much as I could.
Until one day, when I went too far, I finally did it! I drank too much milk. And I—
I think many people have stories like this.
In the day leading up to taking my cushion pills, I started to feel queasy. Not just after taking the pills, but also before.
It was like my body was learning. It was learning what those pills would do to me, and it was trying to stop me from taking them.
It felt like a battle. In one corner, my body, the joint-destroying skin-scabbing vomit-inducing menace. And in the other corner, little old me, just trying to exist, by taking my poison.
So who was in the right?
Of course, fighting helps nothing. No, instead of fighting, I tried to calm my body down.
I tried breathing deeply, and I developed some comfortable habits and routine around taking the medicine. I would follow my set plan, with no sudden movements or changes! And then nothing, hopefully nothing would… hopefully I wouldn’t be sick.
But of course, the routine only made it worse. The routine only helped my body to get even better at predicting when to throw up. And the time between taking the pills and puking got shorter.
As a result, I was throwing up in the evening, straight after taking cushion, instead of on the following morning.
At least I didn’t have to clean myself up immediately before going to work.
Yes, I remember, when I was small, I drank more milk than I ever had before, and then I puked it all up, and it ruined milk for me.
I couldn’t drink milk anymore, I couldn’t look at it, couldn’t even hold a carton, I just started to gag! It made me dizzy, and my—
My body was trying to protect me. It learned that milk was POISON.
Of course, in this case, my body was wrong: Milk is not poison.
My body got it wrong, but that didn’t make it any easier, and every day at nursery, and then at school, the adults brought out milk at snack time, and they told me to drink it.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “It makes me sick.”
And of course, they told me, “Just give it a try. You’ll like it really. It’s just in your head.”
What does it mean for something to be “in your head”?
Our feelings all happen inside our head, or that’s where we catch them, at the very least.
That feeling of sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust… it’s all in your head.
I know this because I watched Inside Out.
And in this case, it was disgust I was feeling. The milk disgusted me. It was a feeling I was feeling. It was in my head.
Can you control your emotions? Are you in control of what they are? Are you happy because you decided to be? Did you choose to be angry or sad? Or is it something that just happened, outside your control?
It’s not an either/or, surely. We can all take steps to influence and manipulate how we feel. Feel angry? Go on a walk to calm down. Feel sad? Go do something fun to cheer yourself up.
But sometimes it’s best not to. You don’t have to change your emotion. Sometimes it’s best to just sit with it and feel that emotion, really, fully.
I know this because I watched Inside Out.
It’s not always bad to feel sad! Let yourself feel it in its totality, in its fullness. Cry it all out, completely. Let yourself feel sad. Honour whatever or whoever it is that’s making you feel this way.
Or if you’re angry, then let it sit! Get hyped up! Go settle whatever it is that’s got you grappled like this! Don’t settle for any less! This is your moment! You can channel this feeling into action, into something good!
Dr Gravy wasn’t looking at me over her sunset glasses.
No, she was looking at her— something had caught her— her computer screen instead— something had caught her eye.
“It says here that you’re transitioning.”
“Yes.”
Then she did turn to face me, before asking:
“And when do you stop transitioning?”
Um..
“Uhh.. Never? I think? I don’t know really.”
She continued looking at me blankly. And then:
“Right.”
She faced the computer again and backspaced through the sentence, deleting it from the first line of my record. I think it was added by a slightly overzealous but well-meaning junior doctor that she was mentoring. He was very charming, but it did cause quite a bit of confusion at the pharmacy when all my details were changed without me asking for it.
“You don’t like needles, do you?” she asked, still looking at the computer.
Huh?
Her hands floated up off her keyboard. And she finally turned towards me fully, and there it was! There’s that look, eyes holding themselves up over their sunset glasses, creases beneath them.
“You don’t like needles, Lu.”
“No, I mean, yes, that’s right. No.”
It turns out, there’s another way to take cushion. It doesn’t have to be pills. You can also inject it, you can self-inject it into your own leg. And of course, I despise needles, because of that time when I was tiny, when I got that pin stuck in my foot and, in a way, it got stuck in my head too, because ever since then I’ve—
At this point, I was experiencing nausea all day in the build up, because my body knew what was coming. And I’d sometimes throw up during my pill-taking.
And then I’d spend two days dealing with it afterwards, throwing up, and lying in bed, feeling like a zombie, doing nothing and eating nothing because I knew it wouldn’t stay down.
No amount of lemony sweets or ginger biscuits could distract my body from the nausea, or all the signals it looked out for to spot the cushion.
“Yes.”
And I was losing a lot of weight too, as you might imagine. Lots of people were commenting on how skeletal my face was starting to look.
“Yes, I’ll do the injections.”
Continue to part four.