I asked my friend Holly, who is also my Rolfer, to give me
an objective, big-picture assessment of some joint pain I've been having. She's a smart healer,
and she's known me a long time, and I was hoping to get from her the kind of
macro-information that is almost impossible to get from specialists. For
instance, how many times do you have to go to a chiropractor before you can
confirm she is a charlatan? If the joints in your left leg have hurt
mysteriously for two years, is it reasonable to expect anything to help, at
all, ever? If both moving and not moving my leg hurts, what should I do?
I wasn't asking about chronic fatigue syndrome, which is
just a given at this point. I was asking about pain specific enough to have a
cause, although like everything else I've ever experienced in my body, the
cause is mysterious. Instead of answering, she started talking about something that
I never want to hear about in the context of healing again: a special diet. She
thought that digestive system health was the big picture, and kept going on
about intestinal flora, body ecology, the breakdown of carbohydrates,
fermentation, leaky guts, etc.
So, she’s one of those people. I tried
to conceal my disappointment, though I didn't do a very good job. I asked her
if she knew that nutrition was a cult. She politely disagreed. I asked her if
she knew that the vast majority of reasonably healthy people eat reasonably
normal food, and she said that healthy people can do a lot of things that sick
people can't. Okay, I'll give her that, but did she know that people on special
diets are just hippie prima donnas who love having the most inconvenient diets
possible, are intellectual cowards who can't accept that their bodies can't be
absolutely controlled by food, are adults playing pretend and taking
meaningless action just to be doing something, are neurotic
obsessive-compulsives grateful for something to focus on besides their real
problems, are crazy fucking food-perverts who get off in an almost sexual way
on depriving themselves, like some sick fucking medieval self-flagellating
purity-obsessed barefoot ascetic nun? Did she know this? Huh? Because it's true. Then I started crying.
The truth is, I hate special diets, and I hate the people
who are on special diets, for the only reason that I can ever seriously hate
anything: I used to believe in it. In the first six years of being ill, I think
I tried every hippie diet in every hippie diet book I could find. I guess the
several-years-of-panicked-fruitless-health-regimens is just a stage every
chronically ill person goes through. I have some very bad memories of the
allergen-free diet in Portland, the anti-Candida diet in Massachusetts, and the
paleo diet in Philadelphia, before I finally gave up. I started eating
normal-person food, and I started to feel like a normal person.
The only thing I ever got out of this healing was stress,
dangerous weight loss, and the feelings mentioned above. At different points, I
fell in with people who had similar “healing diets”/fake allergies/eating
disorders/food fetishes, and we encouraged each other. I think I spent more
time thinking about, talking about, fermenting, soaking, growing, buying, cooking,
and planning food than any person in a non-hunter gatherer society should ever
have to do. The enjoyment of food, of course, had an inverse relationship to
how much time I spent obsessing. I sort of hated the actual eating of the food.
It made me nervous and resentful. There were so many ways to get it wrong.
I've done this a lot in my life. I don't just believe in
things, I become a true believer. There is a streak of religious fanaticism in
me that can attach itself to almost anything. I'm not looking for something
that might be a positive force in my life, something to try it out and see. I'm
looking for ultimate salvation. When I
come across concepts or practices or regimens that seem to offer it, I swallow
them without chewing and take them to their furthest extreme. And then, when
they inevitably fail, I repudiate them completely.
A concise list of things that I currently hate: healing
diets, alternative medicine, acupuncture, veganism, radical politics and the
young white people yelling about them, Portland, Oregon, anarchist punks, Buddhism, spiritual
communities, Vipassana meditation. There's a lot more than this, of course, but
these are the things that fill me with a seething, city-destroying rage, or at
least a smug sense of superiority. It's an overcompensation for the betrayal
and embarassment I feel, since I believed in these things so wholeheartedly,
and they failed to save me. I'm ashamed that I was ever so credulous and naïve,
and so willing to abdicate responsibility and install a program to run my life.
It also reminds me of the pain I was in that made me desperately seek salvation
in the first place.
When I told Holly about my List of Hates, she said it
reminded her of a list of ex-boyfriends who I think damaged me in some way, and
whom I'm still mad at. I think it's an apt analogy. These were some very unhealthy
relationships. The romances between me and my ideologies burned brightly and
died fast. Now we can't be in the same room together without causing a scene.
It's embarrassing for everyone.
I want to stop hating
these things. They don't deserve it. Everything I hate is mostly good. Some of
the things that I hate are laughably wonderful, like acoustic guitar. I miss
that! Think about everything I'm shutting myself off from by hating so much. What's
more, it's not just the –isms that I hate, in practical application it's also
the –ists, who definitely don't deserve it. They are usually good people whose
only crime is reminding me of myself. I don't want to hate my past self. I
don’t want imagine myself in the future, hating my present self. Maybe all this
hate is unnecessary.
So, I might change my diet. It's not unreasonable to suppose
that what you eat has an impact on your life in some way. Maybe I'll do it and
see how I feel, and treat it as a thing that I'm trying, not the ultimate
transcendental truth of what it means to be a human being that will save me
forever. Knowing that I can make a cult out of anything, I really value my
skepticism these days, especially about the things that seem to be working. I
have a strong distrust of almost everything that is making me happy lately, and
that's just fine. Let present happiness be tentative and ever-shifting, not
solid unbreakable ideals that don't actually exist. If nothing else, it will mean less to hate later.