What's Wrong With Me

Answering a question nobody asked.

Pill bottle photo credit: Towfiqu barbhuiya, via Unsplash.

I mentioned recently that one of my primary responsibilities in the caregiving dyad is to oversee nighttime bottle feeding, and that prior to discovering the lifehack that is reading free, public domain works of classic literature on my phone, I was prone to spending these quiet, dark moments otherwise sighing at content¹. Well, despite slowly making my way through Anna Karenina, I still do my fair share of scrolling/sighing, and during one such recent session I came across this Lauryn Oyler piece called “My Anxiety,” a “radio edit,” to use Oyler’s term, of an essay from her new book. The piece was in The New Yorker, was penned by a well-regarded millennial internet addict, and was a personal essay about mental health, so by law I was required to read it.

It was fine. Oyler’s fine. I don’t wanna spend too much time on the appeal of either. Maybe it/she is your cup of tea, maybe it/they aren’t. (OK, fine, real quick: I like that Oyler is willing to go after sacred cows because we need more of that; I thought her novel was exceedingly meh. I think she falls on her face a lot but again we need more writers like that.) 

I bring all this up because, similar to how I had the fantastic idea to remix those “I Voted” stickers with the words “I Farted,” before discovering that someone beat me to it, I’ve been thinking about writing something very much like Oyler’s essay for a while—essentially listing out, with a comprehensiveness that borders on aggression, my general health history (both mental and physical), knowing full well that it will be a self-indulgent slog, but sorta winking the whole way through, sprinkling in a few erudite references then doing a self-conscious somersault at the end and throwing my hands up in a kind of ta-da! motion, like this whole thing was a third grade talent show—because isn’t it? 

And I guess watching this buzzy writer-person do that for one of the last publications that still pays more than a dollar a word for this kind of thing made me think, Well if it’s good enough for those guys it’s probably good enough for this newsletter. And so here we go. 

My first major medical undertaking was orthodontic in nature and took place during the summer between sophomore and junior year of high school. For reasons I can’t recall now, it was necessary to break my jaw and reset it using titanium screws, which are still in there. Recovering from this procedure required my jaw to be wired shut for most of the summer, and I had to eat all my meals through a straw. My mom’s initial experiments in meal liquefaction included meatloaf and clam chowder, a totally icky state of affairs that lasted about 48 hours before I put an end to it, living exclusively on fruit smoothies for the next month or so.

Probably not coincidentally, this experience unfolded alongside the arrival of my eating disorder. I had a big crush on a girl in my grade, who became my best friend, and for reasons me and an MLB-sized lineup of therapists over the years have never pinned down, my reaction to unrequited love was self-destructive bordering on suicidal. I starved myself and I cut myself. My driver’s license photo during this time shows a kid who was 6’5”, 155 pounds. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I’d grown up twenty years later, in this era of heightened awareness and sensitivity toward mental health, but I didn’t. Back then, I wraithed around like a poster child for suicide prevention and no one really said anything.

My first encounter with a therapist and meds was freshman year of college. I’d discovered drugs and alcohol by then, so add binge-drinking and hard drugs to the list that already included anorexia and cutting and you’ve got a seriously addled post-adolescent who needed to be rescued by his parents mid-semester and basically sedated for six months. Things did level out eventually and I was able to resume college, graduate, and try to live a real adult life, but I never actually dealt with any of my underlying issues—the alcoholism, the depression, etc. If anything, I just developed strategies for coexisting with that stuff, but the results were mixed. My career highlight in this regard was the night when, buzzed and depressed about a girl, I yanked a bread knife across the top of my left arm, cutting all the way down to the bone. Sitting there in the hospital emergency room where they stitched me up, my friend coached me through what to tell the admitting nurse to avoid being 5150’d, an outcome that, in hindsight, might have been a whole lot better for me in the long run.

Is any of this boring? Probably. Lemme speed it along: I counted recently and the number of psych meds I’ve taken since my eighteenth birthday is eleven, in varying combinations and for various lengths of time. Over the years I’ve seen twelve different mental health professionals, including at least one overzealous psychiatrist who basically attempted a lobotomy, and someone who specialized in EMDR, which I kind of enjoyed, even if I’m not sure how much good it did. None of these things did more than just paper over the deeper stuff, which I was in no position to deal with until I finally got sober in 2017, and even then it took about four or five years to really gain some perspective.

Of course all of this is just the mental health stuff. I mentioned the jaw surgery in high school. For the next ten years after that, I didn’t experience many physical ailments besides the ones I inflicted on myself, but in my late twenties I lost about forty pounds in four weeks and became so lethargic I could barely use the bathroom without getting winded. This was the onset of Type 1 diabetes, the much rarer form of the disease (roughly 5% of cases) that was formerly known as “juvenile” diabetes for its propensity to mostly show up in kids, but I got it at 29, a real anomaly. Treatment involves giving myself insulin multiple times a day, which I used to do via syringe-like insulin pens but now accomplish with a “closed loop” system that requires wearing two medical devices at all times, devices that beep and malfunction and require long calls with insurance companies to negotiate the upkeep and resupply of, not to mention the cost of the insulin itself, which, as Bernie’s always reminding us, is ridiculous.

But wait there’s more. Not long after the diabetes I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. I wrote about that a little bit here, and the net of it is I’m ok but they got one of my guys, which isn’t the biggest deal, to me at least, but it’s also not nothing. Then of course there was the Big Cancer, last year, the ostensible reason we’re here. In terms of other ailments and maladies, I have a handful of orthopedic issues, such as an ankle that never healed right after I broke it running, a “frozen shoulder” that came out of nowhere, and neuropathy in my feet from the chemo. I also have something called a Schatzki's ring, a reflux-adjacent condition wherein a band of tissue in the esophagus causes food to get stuck, as in the time I had to go to the Austin ER to have a piece of chicken fried steak dislodged during SXSW. Finally, since this whole thing is TMI, I also have something called “Peyronie’s Disease,” or, as my friend calls it, “Gonzo penis,” for reasons you’ll have to google (or not).  

And now, the references. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag critiques Western culture’s tendency to use language and metaphor to subtly stigmatize illness, specifically cancer and before that TB, in a way that extends to judgments of character, the implication being that sickness somehow correlates to disposition. In Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich castigates this whole era of wellness that we live in, making the case that our desire to transcend the stigma of illness and death (and/or the fear of death itself) is what’s actually causing the most harm. I’m sympathetic to both these viewpoints. I think dwelling on the experience of illness implies a need to transcend it, which perpetuates the cycle of aversion and discontent, whereas just accepting it and moving on would be a better strategy. As Pema says: “Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.”

But I’m also a guy with a substack, which is shorthand for a type of modern professional prone to the aforementioned scrolling, sighing, etc., someone not just trained but incentivized by tech and media to share all this, transform it into something, make lemonade from all these…cancer cells. Or psych meds. Or choose any combination of the above. What I tell myself is this is potentially helpful—that if I help just one person to navigate their own journey of illness/addiction/recovery, then it’ll all be worth it (that’s what my mother-in-law told me at least). But I know and Oyler knows that for the most part, I’m only helping myself—that these confessions are as much an act of selfishness as they are an exercise in vulnerability, an overused term I’ve never much liked. 

You know how Oyler resolves this tension? She doesn’t. The essay just ends. 

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This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, why not forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe:

Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.

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1. “Sighing at Content” should basically be an Olympic sport, right? “Doomscrolling” is both too serious and not serious enough. To me, it’s the level of defeated resignation that attends the whole enterprise—that’s what we’d compete in. Neuroscience has advanced far enough that competitors could probably don headsets that measure various neurochemicals as they scroll, and judging could be based on how many times per minute each competitor experienced conflicting and harmful neurochemical signals while consuming their individual feeds. You have to lose in order to win. It’s the American Dream!