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A Little Poison

The temptation to self-loathing, like the temptation to drink or use drugs, is social.

When women of a certain age (mine) gather, as time passes and trust develops, the conversation often turns to plastic surgery. This is a bonding ritual: a display of intimacy and offering, because plastic surgery is hidden as much as possible from the general public. Apparently it is much more widespread than a casual observer would believe. Countless women you know have “had work done.” Over wine and good food, cocktails and snacks, in comfortable living rooms and hotel bar lounges at the end of a long day, women offer to each other precious revelations of what face- and body-attributes they loathe and want to get fixed, and name the procedures they desire.

This reminds me of similar rituals I recall from my college days, where young women simply discussed aspects of our bodies we hated (ugh, my thighs!), despair at eating and weight gain, and commitments to diet and exercise.

Having suffered body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and deep self-hatred, I cannot partake in these rituals today. If I validate even a little physical “criticism,” I will fall into a well of self-loathing I can’t escape. The idea that my body is defective is bad enough; that it can be “fixed” with scalpels, needles, drugs, and money adds another layer of obsession I can’t afford.

Because women bond over finding themselves physically defective, and because I want to bond with them, these rituals incite in me both fear and longing. I long to be included, part of the group, and “normal.” I fear the price. I am reminded of alcoholics, who must give up their happy congenial social drinking at parties and bars. Their friends can imbibe poison and stop, but the alcoholic cannot. For me, indulging in physical self-loathing, even a little bit (just that line on my forehead! Just those hoods over my eyes! Just my flappy neck!) will send me on a bender.

If I mention this to other women, they invariably respond, “but you look great! You don’t NEED plastic surgery!” That is part of the ritual: Woman A says, “I hate _____ body part, I want to fix it,” all the other women say “nooooo you look great!” and then it’s Woman B’s turn to share what she hates about herself. It is generous of these women to try to include me with this symbolic offering. These women look better than I do; if looking great prevented body-focused rumination, they wouldn’t have these bonding rituals, and plastic surgery would’t be a big business.

If I elaborate, they understandably feel judged. I do judge the cosmetic surgery industry, and the social norms of excessive body scrutiny for women. I think these things are toxic. But humans have always enjoyed imbibing small amounts of toxins in groups. Maybe plastic surgery talk is the Ayahuasca of Upper-Middle-Class American women. Maybe plastic surgery itself, like bulemic fasting, simulates meaningful human sacrifice. Maybe I am missing out.

I could just as easily admire these women for being able to “hold their liquor.” That which sends me into a depressive tailspin is just another way to spice up an evening for them. I am fragile and sensitive; they can drink poison and get up the next day and conquer the world.

More power to ‘em! But I hope we can bond over something else, because feeling like an outsider to my sex and class is a bit of a bummer. Although not as big of a bummer as crying in the fetal position with suicidal ideation after overscrutinizing myself in a mirror at age 22 and ending up in a treatment center.

The War of Resistance

“Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, the past is altered, but war is constant; the names of the combatants are changed retroactively, but combat is continuous.

Members of nations at war bond more tightly with their compatriots. War offers a shared dream of triumph over a common enemy. Thus, continual state of war is an effective means of social control. It doesn’t really matter who Oceania is at war with, as long as Oceania is, and always has been, at war.

1984 illustrates how supporting wars is a sucker’s game. War is a product of the Establishment — governments, the military-industrial complex, corporations — using us, the people, to maintain their power. Keeping us in line. Keeping us obedient with fear!

We the enlightened, who have read 1984, don’t get caught up in nationalism. Instead, we RESIST. We resist the war machine, the governments, the military-industrial complex. We don’t play their games. We organize a student protest! We build a shantytown on campus. We demand a ceasefire now!

Students have always joined such movements against the Establishment. “Revolution Now” has been chanted for centuries. There is always a revolution in progress, and there is always a power structure to be revolted against. There is always a dream of triumph over a common enemy.

While most revolutions fail, every once in a while one succeeds. Then what happens? The Resistance becomes the Establishment. The Resistance IS the Establishment. Just as the students making protest camps on the green lawns of universities ARE the upper middle class.

Who funds the Resistance? The Establishment.

Why would they do that? Because they want to be always at war. The same reason warring nations do. Social control, you dupes.

The Resistance has always been at war with the Establishment.

My Last Hospital-Administered Skyrizi Infusion

$320-per-minute infusion in progress (it takes just over an hour).

What does one wear to a $20,000-a-dose drug infusion? At least one person suggested a tiara and evening gown.

One Skyrizi intravenous infusion dose is 600mg, or ~~2.1164~~ .21164 ounces. At $20,000 per dose that’s ~~$9,450~~ $943,333 per ounce.

CORRECTION: my math was off by a factor of 10. Via JO 753 in a comment below:

“There are 28.3 gramz per ounse. 600 milligramz iz .6 gramz, so an ounse iz 47 dosez. Thats 943,333$ an ounse.

No wonder they can run commercialz for this stuff all day.”

For comparison, gold is $2,051 per ounce, as of this writing. So Skyrizi retails at more than ~~four~~ fourty-six times the cost of pure gold.

I could have saved so much money if I’d gotten infused with pure gold instead of Skyrizi.

Since starting my Crohn’s disease adventure I’ve learned that basically no one pays the retail price of these drugs. Instead, an insurer pays a fraction, and the rest is written off by the pharmaceutical company and hospital so they can claim they’re “charities” and avoid taxes.

It would be like if I charged $150,000 for my $150 Drawings. Customers would still pay $150 and I’d set up a “financial assistance program” to generously cover the rest. Then I’d mark a net loss of $149,850 per drawing, which I could write off my taxes if I made enough to pay big taxes in the first place, but I don’t because I stay just below the poverty line so I can continue qualifying for Medicaid which pays for my Skyrizi.

That’s the difference between someone who buys a cheap tiara and fake movie-prop money off Amazon, and someone who is actually rich.

My friend Minette, who took these photos, thought a shot of my back was important.

Anyway that’s it for my hospital-administered Skyrizi infusions. My next $20,000 dose will be a 360 mg/2.4 mL “single-dose prefilled cartridge with on-body injector”. That’s ~~$15,748~~ $157,222 per ounce, equivalent to about ~~7.68~~ 76.8 ounces of gold.

Gold is looking like a real bargain right now.

The Autoimmune Empire: Depression

Depression is the mind attacking itself. It’s been called a “psychic autoimmune disease.”

This morning, part of me woke up asking, what can I fix? What problem can I attack?
I know — ME!

My motives are good: what can I purify and improve? But the target is wrong.

My impulses — to fix, to cure, to control — may be overactive and delusional, just as my immune system is overactive and confused. My Crohn’s disease is treated with immunosuppressants, designed to calm down the immune system.

My mind, over time, has learned to calm down itself. I have come to accept that I can control very little, so I have learned to give up more, to surrender. This has required me to endure some grief.

I have also simply run out of steam as I’ve aged. No wonder depression was such a problem of my youth: all that energy! All those good intentions run amok! Age itself acts like an immunosuppressant of the mind. As an older friend once told me of the remission of his own depression: “my angst circuits just burned out.”

I have recovered a lot since my severely depressed youth. But a big stress can trigger depression again, just as a big virus can trigger a body’s immune system to attack itself. In fact, having an autoimmune disease seems to be triggering some depression in me now. I can’t fix my Crohn’s disease. But my mind still responds to the stress by saying, FIX IT! Failing to fix it, my mind turns on itself, because what else does it have at hand?

Only surrender, and grief. I wish my immune system could grieve whatever it needs to grieve and leave my tissues alone. Meanwhile, I hope my mind learns to accept it, because however unpleasant Crohn’s disease is, depression is worse.

Medical Impostor Syndrome

Maybe I should start concealing my hair loss with a jaunty hat!

When I was a child I wanted to be sick, because when I was sick I got to stay home from school. Sometimes I was effortlessly sick and got to stay in the oddly quiet house with its peculiar mid-day creaks and sounds and winter light through the windows and extremely lame daytime TV. But at least once I sat near the heat register before school, then asked my Mom to feel my forehead, and with grave worry she said I should stay home. SCORE! But I suffered a vague sense of being ill at ease – my “dis-ease” not physical, but guilt. I hadn’t earned my reprieve from school by being really sick.

One time I got stung by a bee at recess. I don’t think my grade school had a real nurse back then, so when students got owies we went to “the office” where a grumpy secretary would give us a band-aid. I was in a lot of pain, it hurt like hell, and I cried and cried, not just from the pain but from the terror of the pain. “It doesn’t hurt that much!” said the secretary. But it did.

A few years later, in Junior High, I was beset by horrendous menstrual cramps. I also developed painful abdominal cramps and diarrhea even when I wasn’t menstruating. I drank barium and underwent medical scans but no specific cause was found, so I was diagnosed with the vague “irritable bowel syndrome,” with no treatment and no sympathy (in contrast to my brother, who had already been through several surgeries for what was later diagnosed as Crohn’s). Doubled over in pain at school, I would go to the office where the grumpy nurse would roll her eyes. “You just have to live with it!” she would snap, as I begged to go home. “Period pain” plagued the rest of my life; I would spend 3 days a month in bed, in agony, until at age 50 I got a hysterectomy and sweet, permanent relief. I was finally permitted a hysterectomy because doctors finally discovered an orange-sized fibroid in my cervix; decades of mere pain weren’t enough to merit any treatment.

Now I have late-onset Crohn’s disease, presumably triggered by my extended bout with COVID this Spring. (Many autoimmune disorders are linked with COVID; I call it COVID-Reactive Autoimmune Pathology, or CRAP.) I got myself referred to the GI department not because of pain, but because months of bad poops had me concerned. One colonoscopy later and bam, I have an incurable progressive RECOGNIZED autoimmune disease that even qualifies as a disability. I’m prescribed a $150,000-a-year designer treatment which my insurance actually covers, and everyone feels sorry for me. I soak up pity like a thirsty sponge.

Just as I’ve seen no correlation between quality of artwork and recognition/money, there seems to be no correlation between pain and external compassion. Some of the worst pain in my life, no one gave a shit about. But Crohn’s? Everyone validates it, and assumes I’m in more physical pain than I am. Yes I am in pain sometimes, if I stray from my ridiculously narrow diet of fresh juice and “safe foods” (Rice Chex, rice cakes, white rice, peeled potatoes, lactose-free dairy, eggs, and fish). But mostly I’m fine. Friends express sympathy and support, but do I deserve it? Sometimes sharing my diagnosis feels like putting my head near the heat register of my childhood home.

On the other hand, I can’t eat real food any more, and when things go wrong they go very, very, crap-in-my-pants wrong. I’m losing my hair and have some dreadful co-morbid skin conditions. And I have these really cool pictures of the inside of my colon (TRIGGER WARNING!):

Continue reading “Medical Impostor Syndrome”

He-ing Corinna

Corinna, my friend and podcast co-host, is a man to me. I don’t think it’s because I’ve been using sex-based pronouns for him, as I do for everyone. He does pass; the majority of people read him as female. When I first saw him in a video, I thought, “he passes, he’s cute.” And once I mistook him for a mom, from a distance, while he was unloading his bike parked right next to a dad unloading more bikes with his kids. I read them all as a family unit, didn’t recognize Corinna, and rode right by.

Nonetheless, Corinna is a man to me, and not just on a technicality. Calling him “him” generates for me no cognitive dissonance; I don’t get tripped up as I do with Buck Angel.

Back in the day (circa 2017), when male transactivists liked to claim they were “expanding the bandwidth of womanhood,” gender critical radical feminists responded that such men were expanding the bandwidth of manhood. Why couldn’t we accept that some men are feminine? Men are eager to exclude effeminate men, especially effeminate gay men, from manhood. Meanwhile, unfeminine women, masculine women, were increasingly eager to exclude themselves from womanhood. Radical feminists urged everyone to broaden their acceptance of men and women, to include the full range of behaviors and presentations we call gender.

This seemed sensible to me. I was already opposed to sexist stereotypes, being gender non-conforming myself. But prior to 2017, I believed if an individual wanted to exclude themselves from their sex class, I should support their exclusion. Isn’t that “kind”?

Well, no. It’s not kind to tell someone that they have no place in their natal sex class because they don’t feel like they fit in. Your sex isn’t socially determined. Yes, your social “sex roles” are, but I supported broadening these categories to include everyone. Women can be firefighters and airplane technicians and boxers, strong and active and butch. Men can be pretty and wear dresses and present themselves as objects for consumption, weak and passive and effeminate.

Corinna is a man to me. An effeminate gay man with no gonads, who has been on exogenous estrogen for decades. His fat distribution is more “womanly” than my own. He has long hair; I cut mine short. He is a disenchanted transsexual. Does he want to exclude himself from his sex class? I don’t think so, but other men certainly did in the 1990’s, when he chose irreversible surgery as a teenager.

Corinna is a man attracted to men. He has had relationships with men where both he and they pretended he was a woman. He has told me he doesn’t want to do this again. He knows he is not a woman; he wants to be with a man who accepts him as he is.

Maybe Corinna is a man to me because we’ve had so many conversations about this. Maybe it’s because I really have expanded my idea of manhood and womanhood. Whatever the reason, I now find it jarring when strangers call Corinna “ma’am,” and friends call him “her.” I acknowledge some people sincerely perceive him as female. Others might register ambiguity, but think they know what side of “be kind” they should fall on.

Sometimes I joke that I call Corinna “he” because I’m an asshole. Or because I’m so rigid about using sex-based pronouns. But the fact is, I really, truly, sincerely perceive Corinna as a man, albeit an extraordinary one. Extraordinary men are men, and, extraordinary though he may be, Corinna is no exception.