10 pounds, 15 pounds, 17 pounds

baggage of a few different kinds

CW: I report a conversation with a doctor about 10 pounds, so, body issues. Plus I talk about childhood trauma, although not my own. Also mental illness, my own. I don’t talk about the aurora borealis but here’s a picture anyways, because people like pictures in things they read:

It might seem like I tell you everything there is to know about me, sometimes. I told you about the time I thought that I was going bald. I told you about the time my friend killed himself when I was texting him. I told you about the time I got ECT and I hadn’t washed out the conductive gel from the previous time I’d gotten ECT, and that is one of my strongest memories of the ECT, getting scolded by a nurse because I hadn’t washed my hair.

If you read my poems over there maybe I tell you more, but maybe whatever the more is that you think I’m telling you is actually a deflection, or an invention, or a prevarication.

This too could be a prevarication, or a fabrication, or confabulation. But, mostly these days I don’t confabulate, I set down Truth, as I know it, even though I have never believed the Whole Truth could be told, even though I know it is impossible to tell Nothing But The Truth, which would be a great name for a .. something. An album, or a chapbook.

****

Right now I’m busy getting ready for my thru-hike, which is soon, very soon. And I’m reading Happily, a book I’m very happy has finally come out; it’s a collection of essays the first of which I discovered in The Paris Review in the beginning of lockdown, and it was such an incandescent and bizarre and heartfelt and gruesome essay that I’m always telling people about it, always reminding myself about it, a meditation on the cataclysm we were going through (a thing we like to forget these days, as much as we can). “Fuck the Bread, the Bread is Over”, which kind of said it all to me, then, and still, now.

****

Speaking of the trauma of the pandemic, the other day someone asked me had my children had any special trauma growing up?

First I said no, not really, just the usual, and a little later I said “oh, well, the pandemic, how did I forget that” and then later that night, crying, I remembered the thing that is always the heart of trauma, isn’t it, always the worst curse to curse your children with, and that thing was me.

Me and my despair, me and my tears, me and my knives, me and my hospitalizations, me lying down on the kitchen floor, me dunking my face in a bowl of ice water and then going on cooking dinner, me coming home drunk at 8pm because what else was I to do with the trauma of what happened at work but go out after work with my friends and drink about it, me in a darkened room on a day they wanted me to be out at the playground, or at the pool, me after ECT, me after ketamine infusions, me in July, rushing around the house yelling about nothing, me in December, crying silently, night after night. Me and my terrible fucking genes, me and my mental illness and my meds and my bad coping mechanisms and my terrors and my anxieties and my pain.

No trauma at all, really, nothing to speak of, only me, their mother, clinging on for dear life just to stay there for them, for long periods of time hardly able to do more than that, only to stay.

When do you ever get credit for staying, though? Staying is like infrastructure, you only notice when it falls apart. Who notices the white knuckle grip on the edge of the kitchen counter, till it’s gone?

I do, at least. Everything I didn’t give my children, everything I couldn’t, everything that was beyond my capacity — I give what I can, I gave what I could, I sometimes gave up other things I wanted very badly too, so that I could stay.

“No particular trauma,” I said.

“oh well, the plague years, I guess,” I said.

“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” I said.

***

I actually didn’t mean to write about that.

I meant to write about my quest for a 15 pound baseweight for my backpacking trip.

I also meant to write about the 10 pounds I have gained, slowly, over the last year, and have watched, anxiously, that whole time, obsessed over, worried at, wondered at, hated myself for. At my age! To care about 10 pounds. When I am the healthiest I’ve ever been, having quit smoking the requisite “over 5 years ago”, having taken up first pole dancing, then backpacking, then a little bit of bouldering to train better for the backpacking, then weight training, to help with the bouldering, being just about to embark on a very long journey in which I will walk, the whole way, over 53 mountains - I, a woman who does not like walking uphill, or being cold, or being too hot, a woman who is afraid of heights.

Me, this woman, in this body, I’m almost ready to leave for the trip, and so I go to the doctor to get a tetanus shot and some antibiotics in case I run into a tick, which I will, and at the doctor I refuse to fill in the depression screener “we don’t need to waste the time, I already have doctors for that” I say to the doc, and he says “your scores always terrify me anyways” —

After all this, the doctor says he sees I’ve gained 10 pounds since I was last in his office three years ago, and what do I make of that?

WHAT DO I MAKE OF THAT?

It’s a stupid question and I understand why he asked it but I’m still angry he asked me about it. Because honestly, what am I supposed to say?

Gee, Doctor, I didn’t notice. I am an American woman, of course I noticed. Gee Doc, well some of that weight is probably muscle, because I can now climb up a pole with my bare hands and walk up mountains while carrying 25 pounds on my back, feats of strength I had never dreamed of attempting ever before, but I do them now.

But then it’s “well how do your clothes fit?”

Well they’re all really tight on the shoulders.

“And your waist? How are your clothes around your waist?”

IT PERSISTS, this ridiculous conversation about 10 irrelevant pounds, and though I refused to answer the alcohol screener as well, not wanting a lecture or a pat on the back, depending on whether or not I lied and how much so, even though once you start refusing doctors it’s so intoxicating you just keep doing it “no thank you, I do not want a knee x-ray” “nope, I’ll have a pap smear when I get back after the summer”, “no, one mammogram every two years is just plenty for me” “no colposcopy, that seems painful” the list of things you can refuse doctors is long and exciting, but I did not refuse to step on the scale and at no point during this irrelevant conversation with my doctor did I refuse to discuss whether my waist has enlarged or whether I simply have grown less tolerant of tight clothing.

I like a pair of pants with four way stretch and a pfas-free durable water repellant coating, now, and I sometimes buy them a size larger so that I can wear a base layer underneath them, and so I don’t know how to answer the question did my middle get bigger.

But also, what if it did? Am I simply expected not to age? I’m already taking estrogen, mostly because I am not yet ready for my vagina to atrophy and because I do not like hot flashes, and also maybe for the rage, but of course it’s always so hard to tell with rage: is it just me or is it that Sam Altman made GPT-40 a flirty little girlfriend voice, is it that David Copperfield turns out to have had a thing for teenage girls, is it that Arizona revived a law from before the civil war in order to deny people dominion over their own bodies (and yes I know they overturned it again, but IT WAS A FUCKING EFFORT), or is it my own body declaring its freedom from my dominion, that whatever I do I’m going to get older, get the dreaded belly fat, the Menopause Belly Fat, was it 7 pounds of meat and 3 of fat, but the bad fat, the belly fat, or was it 10 pounds all hard muscle, so I can “be fucking hard” not “weak and gay” as a republican candidate for office suggested the other day?

Don’t be weak and gay, or have belly fat, or grow old, or be a woman, or be a mother, or be a mother who sometimes could only cry, or be a woman who doesn’t know if her pants still fit, or be a woman who has obsessively watched that number creep up while doing not much to stop it, because what, exactly, was she doing wrong, with the fresh air and the exercise and the climbing and the walking, was she simply eating too much, and if so, what would she decide not to eat in order to make the number go back down, or at least stand still, fit back into who she was before, a woman who could not hike 12 miles with 25 pounds on her back, who would have laughed at the thought, a woman who’d last climbed the tallest hill in her town when trying to bring on labor, who’d last climbed a mountain in 2017, and hadn’t liked it.

I should have asked my doctor this question. I should have asked him do you want me to cut that ten pounds out of myself and bring it to you, on a plate, along with my strength and my confidence, along with the long scar on my right calf from a thorn that caught me in the Arizona desert, and these scars on my hands from the bouldering, and tied up inside that 10 pounds of my flesh shall I bring you my rage, and the fierce joy I now feel when I have set up my tent and turn to the sunset, and will you take the owl who greeted me after I walked through the desert, and the bear who passed me in the forest the first time I went up a mountain to sleep alone in a tent that I carried on my back?

Do you want also the food I ate to build this body into something that would carry me to such places?

Here, take the cheddar I had at my brother’s the other night, take the feta soaked in oil and oregano, take the labneh and the lamb stew. Take the cake, the wine, and the butter.

I wrestled a live demon out of my own back with these arms, I say. I held a black cat while I pricked his ear, like a fairy tale, every two hours, 7 times in one day, to find out if he was too sweet to live, and by precisely how much. And I did it again, and again. Here, take my arms, the useless things, surely they add up to 10 pounds of flesh for your records, a sacrifice for your gods.

I should have said all that, but I didn’t. “Most men who do a long trail are malnourished by the end.” I said instead. “Women aren’t, usually, but they do tend to lose some weight. So maybe I’ll worry about the 10 pounds later,” I said.

But that wasn’t true. I worried about it now, like I worried about it four months ago. I try to remember what Anne Lamott once said about a thing a friend told her, a dying friend, to the not-yet-dying Lamott, asking if a dress made her hips look too big. “Annie,” said the dying friend, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.”

None of us have that kind of time, and one thing I’m really excited about is that on the trail I won’t have a scale anymore, so I won’t be able to see what my 10 pounds of flesh are doing, if they stay or slink away, or if they grow, even, in order to do the work I am asking of them. I’m tired of thinking about those 10 pounds.

*****

On the other side of the coin, my quest for a different kind of lightness, a sub-15 pound baseweight, which does not qualify me as an ultralight backpacker but is certainly impressive for a newb.

The silliest thing I did for my baseweight was switch from taking 3 100mg Seroquel tablets at night to taking just 1, 300 mg tablet, because I thought it would weigh less. It does not. It turns out that 1 300 mg tablet is exactly the same weight as 3 100s. (This seems painfully obvious in retrospect, of course).

My instincts in emergency preparedness clash a fair bit with my desire to achieve a 15 pound baseweight, because even if I don’t bring something extra for myself, just in case, I imagine being able to help other people by carrying just a little bit extra, a spare bandaid, an immodium. I have benedryl, I’ll say. Oh, I can spare you some paracord for a guyline, I’ll say. Have some earplugs, do you need to borrow a little bit of battery, could you use a dry pair of socks? There were many things I was not good at, as a mother, but we would never run out of food, or batteries, we would always have clean water and a way to light a fire and an extra blanket, six extra blankets, the narcan, the paxlovid, the morning after pill, tampons, toilet paper, tape. Shelf-stable milk.

I’m not sure I’m willing to give this part of me up in order to carry less on the trail, so I probably won’t. I have already had to give so much up. I gave up my big black leather hat, the one that made me look most like a witch, because it weighed 11 ounces. I gave up my travel tarot cards, the tools of a witch, they weigh 4, and after all one can divine just as well with three coins or six twigs or some animal bones. I gave up many impractical items of clothing, although I haven’t yet given up the idea of a “town dress” either a black sack weighing 6.3 ounces or a purple one weighing 5.7. I haven’t given up on a spare lighter or a paper map or a good compass with declination adjustment. I haven’t given up on the kindle or the paper journal or the extra warm sleeping bag or the spare stakes.

I gave up my favorite water bottle and most of my jewelry and deodorant and a towel. I’m not bringing a single scarf. Still the ounces add up to pounds, and every object is a question about what I value: comfort, safety, style, entertainment. Do I bring the flask of whiskey and the flask of vinegar tonic too? If I give up the whiskey then I give up all my smoke and burn, all my Death. If I give up the tonic, I give up on my microbiome, all that Life. Which kind of salve to bring? How many bandaids? The warm socks AND the booties, or just the socks? What about the umbrella? The raincoat, but which one? The rain pants or the rain kilt, or both, until I decide what works best?

All of the ounces adding up to pounds and the pounds adding up to weight, a psychological weight, and a physical one, the weight I’m supposed to shed on this trip, I’m going to become weightless, I’m going to become light, ultralight, I’m going to float away on a tank of helium — no wait, not quite that light, not like that, not up and gone, wandering the mountains of the next world until I’ve finally forgotten my own name.

Because in the end, I can’t yet forget my own name. I’m eager to leave, but I still, fundamentally, have to Stay. It is in part because I feel I have to Stay that I have decided I must temporarily Leave. It is a lightness in my heart that I am looking for, but it’s not so easy to know how to get it. It’s easier to squint at a spreadsheet and weigh socks and pills and toothbrushes than it is to figure out what needs to be left behind to lighten the heart.

The only way to lighten the heart is to go on the trip, or so I say to myself, mindful that I must have a good reason to Leave, even temporarily, mindful that lots of people think that a mother should never Leave, not even temporarily, not even a mother who isn’t sure she’s not making things worse with all her staying, these days, all her nosy questions and annoying suggestions and endless anxieties.

Sometimes kids need a little less of their mother, I say, as if I haven’t been a little bit less of a mother the whole goddamn time, as if I haven’t been what the doctors (always the doctors) would call a traumatic event, as if I’m not somehow responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in their lives, the root of their ills, a terrible host, too absent and too present at the same time, lying under the dining room table, hiding in the closet, submerging myself in the bathtub wondering if I could drown myself there.

How can you leave, you ask? The real question is how the fuck I ever managed to stay.

Shitty is better than dead, I said to myself, again and again. Crazy is better than dead.

Even absent is better than dead, I whisper to myself, while also out of the side of my mouth saying to you quietly, calmly, reasonably: I am not at risk of suicide, I do not need a wellness check, you are not a mandated reporter of anything, I can’t help it if I think so much about death, but it’s only thoughts, so don’t worry.

****

I will take these 10 new pounds of flesh on my body and I will carry perhaps even as much as 17 pounds of hopes and dreams and help with me into the mountains. Will I return lighter, or heavier, or lighter in some ways and heavier in others? Will it be easier to stay in this world after I’ve gone away, or will it be just as hard, or harder? Will I want to keep going away and away, again and again, until I disappear into the wild like that Jon Krakauer book? I don’t know the answers to these questions.

One thing I do know is that I am done with stepping on doctor’s scales. I can tell a doctor how many ounces these pants and those socks weigh, but I will not willingly again tell a doctor how much I weigh.

You think I tell you everything, but see: I won’t even tell you how much I weigh.