We Feed Ourselves Snacks In Order To Live

One of the most interesting things about being a deeply cynical and too-online person (a horrible combination!) in recent years has been that almost everything in the world that I’ve been worried about has turned out worse than I imagined.

Yesterday was, I guess, an example of that: I expected it to happen, but I didn’t expect for it to happen so soon and so suddenly, on a Friday morning as I sat in my office sending emails. I saw a tweet mere seconds after the decision came down; I drained my can of seltzer; I walked out to the kitchen to grab another and announced loudly to the few people already in the office with me (all men) that I no longer had bodily autonomy and what a way to start a Friday.

We’re all used to it at this point: Something really horrible happens, and we just keep on sending emails. We keep on completing tasks. It feels awful and dystopian and weird, but personally, I need to keep doing it. I have to keep going, to do the daily tasks and the check ins and the work that keeps my focus, because if I do not do those things, I will walk directly into the fucking sea.

Many of you have heard this story already, but allow me some redundancy: Almost 20 years ago now, my life was irrevocably changed when I walked into the bathroom at my very first job and coughed up blood into the sink. I went to my doctor’s office that morning expecting I’d be back in the office in the afternoon. It took three months: The month where I lay awake and miserable in a hospital bed, presuming I had pneumonia that simply wasn’t getting better; the month that I blissfully can’t remember because I was trach’ed up, in a medically induced coma, and having my poisoned blood cycled out of my body and cleaned and cycled back in, and the month I spent trying to pull my damn life back together after waking up and finding myself both sick as hell and so weak I couldn’t walk or lift my arms over my head.

It takes a long time to figure out what the fuck happened while you were in a coma for a month, but it doesn’t take very long to realize that fuck, you missed a LOT of work. And so I started trying to make up for that as soon as I could, which is how I found myself lying in the ICU on a conference call with a band I was working with. I held my flip phone to my ear with one hand, using the other hand to cover my trach hole so that I could croak out words. I remember the call vividly; I was trying to convince the band to put my favorite demo of theirs on their nearly-finished album. I succeeded, and I felt successful, and then my arms ached for the rest of the day because holding a phone to my ear was, at that point, a huge accomplishment.

The day prior was the day I’d had the trach tube taken out, and for several hours thereafter when I put my fingers to my throat and no words came out, the doctors thought that there was permanent damage to my vocal cords and that I’d need to do speech therapy in addition to physical therapy. They threaded a teeny tiny camera down my nose and throat to figure out why I couldn’t speak, and I wordlessly threw up all over the resident assigned to the task before they determined that there was nothing wrong. I tried again an hour or so later, and words suddenly came out; I celebrated by asking my father to go get me a burrito from Cafe Habana. I weighed ninety-nine pounds at that point, and no amount of hospital food was going to gain the weight I needed back.

Why am I telling you this now? Because at the time, I remember thinking that nothing else from here on out will be harder than this conference call. The ability to push through my physical circumstances and complete a task that would have made the pre-illness version of me a nervous wreck was one I didn’t know I possessed. What I didn’t know at that time was that I’d spend the rest of my life accessing that part of me, and that it would be the primary driver of my sanity for the last three years. Bad shit happens, and I compartmentalize my brain and I just keep sending the emails.

Does all of this make me a monster? In some capacity, probably, but also we’re all doing it because we have to. There is no choice, just as there’s also no real option for us all to move to Canada or to force men to get vasectomies before we’ll fuck them or to use Instagram stories to effect change. But we talk about these things, because it makes us feel just a tiny bit better to do so.

Last night on my way home from work, I stopped at the grocery store and bought supplies for assuaging my panic: onion rings, chicken tenders, barbeque sauce, queso, chips, cheese, chorizo, dumplings, a bottle of really good rye. I ate the tenders and onion rings with four sauces (I had honey mustard and ranch in the fridge) because I use sauces to self-soothe. For a little while, it worked. For a little while, I felt free in a country where I will probably never be free again.

Stay angry, babes. We’re going to need it.

[Also, a note for anyone who has the means and wants the resources: Here is a list of abortion funds you can donate to. A gentle reminder that Planned Parenthood is well-funded and doesn’t need your dough as bad!]

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a (sometimes) weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!