A “greater freedom than what was out beyond the walls”

Emma Madgic
November 11, 2022

Give Leonard Jefferson a pen and paper, and he can draw anything. Paint, too—whether it be watercolors, acrylics, or charcoal, Jefferson does it all. He is also skilled at silk screen printing, making stained glass, and sewing.Jefferson perfected all of these crafts in an unlikely place: prison. He is still trying to get the murder conviction that landed him in prison overturned, claiming that he did not rob and murder Providence landlord Virginio DeFusco (who was found dead in his apartment building) on the evening of December 7, 1973. He served almost fifty years of his original conviction—a life sentence—and was released on parole from the Adult Correctional Institutions in December 2019.During the almost fifty years he spent in prison, Jefferson turned to art, his favorite childhood pastime, in order to stay sane.For three of those fifty years, Jefferson had only a flute, a few pencils, and sheets of printer paper with which to make music and art. In 1976, the installation of the Arts and Corrections Program introduced inmates to state-provided instruments, crochet and ceramics classes, and free painting supplies that revolutionized Jefferson’s experience.Art, Jefferson insisted, wasn’t a way to escape his circumstances at the ACI. Rather, he used his abilities to amplify the injustices he saw while incarcerated.“It wasn’t an escape from reality because for a lot of pieces, the subject matter is reality,” Jefferson said. “Art is a way to tell the story.”

For All Our Squirrels

Lucy Cooper-Silvis
November 11, 2022

On those special childhood afternoons when the world outside was pressed for all its worth, I’d gather the supplies necessary for a squirrel show. Pounding through dusty hallways, scuttling up and down the basement’s fearful steps, and lurking through the kitchen’s drawers, my small hands, sweaty from excitement, searched, discovered, and collected.I found a plastic bucket smelling of the blended, sweet echo of Halloween candy, deep enough to fit a bowling ball and several crammed-in Beanie Babies. I’d fill the pail with snacks from the kitchen, some forgotten by my parents, others stolen from under their noses: a half-filled sleeve of Saltines, stale after being left open for a week, an unopened box of Triscuits, two packages of Lay’s with grease already around the edges, and the careless Cheez-It crumbles rattling at the bottom of the bag. With the bucket full, I’d heft it with small-boned arms to the outside world, where the jays bullied robins and the robins snipped back. I stumbled down the porch’s steps, from which red paint peeled up in tongues. A foot or so away from the bottom stair, I positioned the bucket on a continent of pebbled pavement, separated from the rest by cords of dandelions and other quick-witted weeds. With the squirrel show carefully, animatedly set up, I’d return to the bottom step and wait, sometimes accompanied by friends or sisters, sometimes not. Co-hosts present or not, I’d watch patiently for my first performer, my breath eager and loud in the silence.II. AnticipatingThe fishtank filter hums as its waterfall tiptoes on the surface of the water. The angelfish within drifts forward and back. With its saucer eye, it regards the room: the closet doors overtaken by Post-it notes, books collapsing into rainbow gradients on shelves, and a desk crowded by leaves and cacti, at which a lone girl sits, staring back.I look at the fish, and then return to the words on my screen. The cursor stutters at the blank line following. The sentence is slow to draw near and scatters at the crackling of my keyboard, but I am patient. I look for support in my notes, pages filled with odd sentences, reminders about the story’s timeline, and a plot skeleton marked halfway through with roman numerals, the other half with arabic numerals. My eyes snag on one of those odd sentences: Pounding through dusty hallways…The sound of a keyboard at work joins the patter of the fishtank filter.3. Watching The squirrel was hesitant to approach the bucket, gray nose quivering. It skittered in staccato bursts: one moment, pressed on the grassy yard, the following, blending in with the edge of the sidewalk, the next, at the bucket, peering at the food inside.Standing there, its front paws on the pail and its cotton-candy tail twitching behind, it watched me, dark eyes innocently afraid, and it minced broken Cheez-its into flakes on its snowy chest. I watched the creature silently and without movement, so I wouldn’t scare it away when I’d spent so long tempting it here.‍

Olneyville Community Library: A Safe Haven for Patrons

Emma Madgic
November 4, 2022

Sandwiched between Stokes Street and Diamond Four C’s, so close to La Lupita you can smell onions and carnitas sizzling on a warm night, there is a dilapidated red brick building. A red sign alerts passerby to what’s inside: the Olneyville Community Library. The building looks unassuming, but don’t be fooled: inside is a bustling hub for parents, children, English learners, artists, and everyone in between. Here at Olneyville Community Library, there’s something for everyone. Tanya Diaz is working at one of the computers the library provides for free to visitors. Diaz has been here every day this week, applying for jobs in customer service and for government subsidized housing in Boston. She doesn’t have a laptop at home, and hasn’t had a job since the pandemic began. Marc Anselmi walks in and goes straight to the front desk, where he asks for information on prion, an abnormally folded protein that can trigger disease in animals and humans. Anselmi, a regular at the Olneyville Community Library, speaks in a harsh whisper but is a kind man, says library manager Joseph Morra. Anselmi’s two favorite subjects are botany and poetry, and he has helped the peace lilies in the library flourish. He’s a sucker for children’s movies, and checks one out almost every time he visits the library. Amanda Kathryn, a spritely young woman with tattoos covering her arms, sits at another computer. She signs in using her middle name, Kathryn, instead of her last name because she has an abusive ex-boyfriend who she’s afraid will find her if her first and last name are printed. She’s relatively new to the Olneyville Library — she moved to Olneyville in 2019. Today, she’s crafting her first resume.

My Mother the Chef

Izellah Zhang
November 4, 2022

My mother self-identifies as a chef rather than a cook. Even though the recipe might say one teaspoon of sugar, she would change the amount to something else because she believes that her version would taste a lot better, and be a lot healthier. Her initial attempts at baking were quite unsuccessful, to say the least. My mother was usually quite sure of which ingredients to put in, but she seemed lost with the first few cakes she made. I walked into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water but instead, I found the kitchen in a mess. Untied flour, eggs, a weighing scale, and the chopping board were all spread out randomly. I had to scavenge in the mess to find where our kettle was. I’ve never been that much of a baker myself. Of course, after my mother’s fiasco in our kitchen, that’s hardly surprising. I remember one of the few attempts that I made at baking. A friend of mine was hanging out in our apartment one day, and out of the blue, she asked me if I wanted to make something with her. I realized that we had all the necessary materials anyway, so I told her, why not. We opened drawers and cupboards, looking for all the materials we needed. The kitchen seemed to expand in size as I searched diligently for things in cupboards and cabinets. The first cake my mother made was scorched on the outside. The odor of burnt crumb wafted through the kitchen and spread slowly into the rest of our home. The cake was covered in a coat of black, and the shape was also distorted. I think my mother tried to make it a regular cylinder shape, but the cake leaned to one side, and the base was smaller than the top. I scrunched my nose as I took in the cake—it didn’t look or smell good.

Casitas

Nélari Figueroa-Torres
October 28, 2022

Wailing children awaited me every morning and afternoon. Sticky remnants of spilled soda on leather seats, cracked with age, wiggled with each node in the journey. We sat. Only 6:45 am and we shipped ourselves to another barren municipality. Its main attraction was a colonnade of multicolor wooden houses, reflected on the dew, magnetized to the bus’ windows, foggy with nature’s chilled morning breath. Hours and bell rings later, kids were balmy, proving intelligence by spelling “Call of Duty” as K-A-L-O D-U-T-I. Exposed wooden ceilings. expose, the Fanta powder beneath the wooden cabinets, swiftly swept so Madrinita would not know we poured an extra glass. Our bikes jerked with the sidewalk’s potholes. Our knees never got a break from the chipped cement, cheeks never rested from disruptive cackles, and foreheads never thirsted for more beads of sweat. III Down the street and up the stairs was a universe on platforms and behind wooden doors. Of rough tiles and scattered paintings. Of floor fans and makeshift TV antennas. Tata greeted us with her sage hands & everything savored, heavenly. In monogrammed glasses, she served water that somehow tasted better than that of the same kind in any other cup, in any other home.

I Remember (Being Fed)

Simran Singh
October 28, 2022

I remember a bowl of plastic fruit. I remember the bowl sat atop the fridge in our little kitchen. Nothing more than a hidden decoration for the short and petite. Out of sight but not out of mind. I remember the bowl had all manner of fruit—grapes, apples, oranges, and a banana that was too yellow and misshapen to be mistaken for real. They were poor imitations, nothing more than props to be used by twenty-somethings with fussy children. But, nonetheless, they fed me. I remember my mother and I created a ritual to keep each other fed until the end of time. It went something like this: I complain about the texture of the rice. My mother mashes the curry and rice together by hand until it’s unidentifiable. She shovels spoonfuls of said nothingness into my mouth. In return, I offer her some of my plastic fruit, sometimes grapes or even the gnarly-looking banana. She pretends to take a bite and chew thoughtfully. End scene. We’d rinse and repeat this performance day after day, with my father, the stagehand, cleaning up anything we’d leave behind. I remember my mother recounting the story of the plastic fruit, even after I reassure her that I’d heard it enough times. She always likes to end with you were always such a picky eater, you know? Drama girl. I remember a glittery lunch box stained with curry. My mother woke up before the crack of dawn to pack hot lunch for my first day of school. I remember the food leaving a too-yellow banana-like residue on the cafeteria table in places where the box wasn’t tightly sealed. The boy next to me shrieked and pointed in horror. As if my lunchbox was an alien in a B-rated horror movie, just oozing ectoplasm. Disgusted, I threw everything away, staring longingly as the rice lay uneaten and limp at the bottom of the trash can. Inedible. Just another prop. I remember my mother saying, after I came back from school: Did you finish all the food I packed? When I showed her my empty lunchbox, she was overjoyed. It was my first convincing performance to date. I was always such a picky eater, you know? A drama girl. I remember begging my mother to buy me Lunchables the next time she went to the grocery store. The other kids at school wore those sliced ham and cheese crackers like personal badges of honor. And then I remember the crushing disappointment I felt after biting into my first ham slice. Like swallowing plastic (but maybe plastic was more edible). Cracker in hand, I remember staring in longing at the gritty cafeteria table, at the unmarked grave of the banana residue. I imagined willing the alien back to life with my gaze. I remember the bowl of plastic fruit. How it must have read, “WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF SMALL CHILDREN.” I remember my first time trying a mango lassi. I was visiting my aunt in India, and we visited a roadside vendor for refreshments after being roasted alive in the Delhi sun. I remember taking a sip from the plastic cup and enjoying the way that the coolness spread along the back of my throat. I prayed I could feel that cold all the time. I remember my first time getting food poisoning after trying a mango lassi. Ten sips later and I lay on the exposed cement floor of my aunt’s apartment clutching my abdomen. Later I would learn that the tourists called it “Delhi Belly,” but I was adamant that I was no alien (just my gut apparently). I was always such a picky eater, you know? Even my gut was picky! I spent my remaining days in bed purging this familiar parasite from my body, like an A24 movie. Like I was ejecting a bottomless cornucopia of phony fruit. Fruit that comes with labels like “WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD.” I remember alien guts and gut aliens. I remember a biology professor’s presentation on how immigration changes the human gut microbiome. I imagined my mother stepping foot on U.S. soil for the first time and being stripped bare, her old gut displaced by a new one. A misshapen alien-banana one. Then passing her newfound loss onto her daughters. I remember blaming my food poisoning on a fraudulent army of gut colonizers infiltrating her DNA, my DNA. I was always such a picky eater. But pickiness is in our genes, don’t you see? Doesn’t it all make sense now? Doesn’t it? I remember. I remember it all, but I forgot where my mother keeps the bowl of plastic fruit. Remind me to ask.

perennials

Alyssa Sherry
October 21, 2022

the rocks were jagged beneath us and tattooed with spray paint that softened like sweat on our fingers. new york city shimmered distant, a needlepoint constellation stitched against the june horizon. as we sat there i didn’t even think to ask where your mother had been buried. maybe i should have, but i don’t know what kind of flowers she would have liked best for me to leave behind. i think that her favorite book was where the crawdads sing. i don’t know the etiquette of a cemetery—if it’s socially acceptable to leave a novel at a headstone. it’s just occurring to me now that the movie just came out and she’ll never see it. in that moment i wanted to melt into you the way tear droplets bead together on chrysanthemums during a funeral. the evening buzzing around us, the cliff below us slicing into darkness, the city glinting in your glasses. suddenly between their frames i could see us again three years ago when you first texted me, “do u have plans this afternoon?” and i replied, “no, what’s up!!” you took me to our high school team’s lacrosse game—you had just painted your nails—they stood out waxy white against the dull chrome of the bleachers—i noticed because i couldn’t meet your eyes—kept looking down. you graduated the year before me, so we haven’t watched a game together in a while. “my father’s plumeria plant is going to bud in august,” i told you when we were sitting on those rocks before the skyline. i didn’t know if you cared—but he does. over four humid summers of longing i’ve watched its stem writhe from soil to sky. “i wonder if i will move away before it flowers.” pause. graffiti splattered near my foot—4evr yung! R + D ‘03. R and D must have grown up by now. i wondered if they had kids and then hated each other. pause again and then i told you, “i’m not sure if i like the way time passes.” this time last year your mother was still alive. there she is standing at your kitchen counter bent over a pyrex measuring bowl and asking me if i like snickerdoodles. of course, i tell her, she smiles, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, leaves a smudge of batter clinging to the tendril, wait fifteen minutes, i smile and you do too. then she asks me how my mother is doing and i say same as always and she says, she is so strong, i hate cancer. i think you probably hate it more than i do, now. your mother probably hates it the most because it ate her from the inside out in only a month. when i found you in the bathroom at her wake i wanted to strangle every single other person in the building. like everyone staring at her corpse all done-up came to shed a few halfway tears and mutter in the threshold as they shuffled out, this is such a tragedy, i’m so glad it isn’t my mom in there, her poor daughter, she was supposed to leave for college today. you were supposed to leave for college that day. don’t you look at her like that! i wanted to scream as you convulsed in my arms in the bathroom and i made eye contact with myself in the bitter grime of the mirror. don’t you look at her unless you know how it feels! but i guess i was a little unfair: i didn’t really know how it felt either, and i hope i never do. and so a year later we were sitting there on those rocks before the skyline. your sweatshirt was so big that it swallowed you, a part of me registered how small you looked, maybe you were losing weight, maybe your heart just takes up a little less space now. you were talking about how much you missed suburbia since you left for boston, but i wondered if you really just missed your mom. “it may surprise you, but after you leave, you will want to come back,” you were saying. i felt teardrops on my face, and then realized that they were only rain.

The Brown University All-Star Team

Gabby Sartori
October 21, 2022

Now, if you thought I was going to begin this piece by gushing over John Krasinski and Emma Watson, you’re sadly mistaken (though they do have responsibility for resurrecting gen z). Am I about to honor my favorite teacher? Lunch Lady? Well, sadly Gale has left her Blue Room legacy behind. No, none of that. I’m talking about the unsung heroes here at Brown University. Whether you yourself have encountered them or not, allow me to introduce you to the all-star roster of people that make sure students around here really get the full college experience. The Bracelet Guy Listen, I’m sure he has a name, but we ALL know who I’m talking about. I like to think this guy owns the tiny spot in front of the bookstore on Thayer Street. No sir, I don’t want your jewelry. He asked me that yesterday, the day before that, the day before that, a year before that, oh and the year before that one. Honestly, I think he even asked my dad on my visit four years back. There he is perched on the street like he owns it. Some may mistake him for the town mayor if you didn’t know ours. Wait—I don’t even know ours. What’s really weird about this guy is that he probably knows more about your life than you think. I mean, he was there the day you purchased your first shirt from the bookstore and he’s always there when you’re in a rush because you’re late for class. I’m almost positive he’s had the honor of being your first “good morning” greeting on your walk of shame after a Friday night (apologies for personal PTSD I may have caused you.) He eavesdrops on your conversations when catching up with your mom on the phone, and waves to you when you’re trying to say hey to your friend behind him on the walk by. He patiently waits for you to cross ongoing traffic at the intersection where cars have the right-of-way but you try playing your own rendition of Crossy Road anyways. He’s the only obstacle on campus, but what’s most important to know is that he’s always there and always will be. Carl Carl is honestly one of those people you remember from a party the night before, and when you see them in broad daylight, it seems so out of place that you almost feel like you’re dreaming. The only thing different is that Carl is very real. Carl is extremely unpredictable and a one of a kind breed. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, have you ever been encountered by an old man in the middle of a sporting event, serenading you with a guitar solo? Yea—didn’t think so. Standing at a generous 5’6” with his New Balance grandpa shoes to compliment his platinum white hair, he is wandering all around this campus and I hope to God you’re lucky enough to encounter him for yourself. Carl might be the hidden gem this school has to offer. If I were ever tasked with giving a campus tour, I would play the biggest game of “Where’s Waldo” in order to find him and help advertise Brown to the group. Carl is famous for his presence at any Brown home sporting event, flaunting his rugby shirt he claims was the “original” jersey he sported during his time at Brown. For context, Carl is a proud, and I mean PROUD class of ‘76 member. He leads the student section, heckles referees, and rallies the troops regardless of what the scoreboard says. I highly recommend going to a sporting event to find Carl. If you’re lucky enough, he may offer up one of his beers in a 12-pack from Metro Mart. The Airsoft Snipers If you go to Brown, Department of Public Safety has definitely slid into your email inbox to tell you of the sniper sightings. And if you have no idea what or whom I’m talking about, consider me your DPS notification. Late night walks around campus on a weekday almost feel like you’re in a warzone. I know campus safety walk exists, but would you rather have Mommy hold your hand and take you from class to class or take the bullet like a champ and show off your battle wounds? You know what they say: No guts, no glory. At least I can say that all the stranger danger talks at school warning you about the creepy van slowly driving next to you are finally being put to good use. That damn walk past Benevolent Street is where the car lurks in the shadows. If you have headphones in, are walking at a slow pace, or just simply look like a vulnerable target, you my friend are the next one on the chopping block. I think it’s safe to say I fit these qualifications pretty easily, considering I’m three for three when walking to and from the east side of campus. Twice I’ve been struck in the thigh, and once they fired a money shot at my head, but luckily I was wearing a hat. You’re probably wondering why the snipers made this list. Though no positive impacts spur from their existence, they long to humble the students who may very well need to be knocked down a couple notches. Maybe I’m one of them? Naked. Donut. Runners. To put it plainly, it’s one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type situations. Should I whip my phone out and take a video? Well, if your friends from home ask what it’s like to attend an Ivy League school, how on Earth are you going to have proof without video evidence? But on the other hand, if your camera is out for too long I guarantee you you’re gonna be deemed a “pervert.” So what exactly is the naked donut run? Well, it starts during the long-feared late nights of Reading Period, triggering the mass movement of stressed future leaders of our world to campus libraries. This of course would involve students who lug multiple textbooks to their carrels for all-nighters and early morning cram sessions. But the libraries also draw the naked lurkers of the night to offer a sweet treat to those in need. Secret until moments before it occurs, the Naked Donut Run has long been a source of excitement, intrigue and mystique for stressed students in libraries across campus. The special day is usually on the last night of Reading Period. During the run, participants deliver donuts all over campus, from the Rockefeller Library to the Sciences Library to the Center for Information Technology. Once inside the libraries, all chaos ensues. A couple hundred or so runners disrobe and hand out doughnuts in the nude. Best part about it? They literally will go up to you offering a donut, and stay there until you take one. Thanks to the Naked Donut Runners, Brown is a place where nudity isn’t stigmatized or judged, and there is always a positive reaction from viewers of the “student body” (both literally and figuratively). Honorable Mentions V-Dub Backdoor: Don’t lie, if you run out of meal swipes or need to food shop off meal plan, this door is your best friend. “Mike”: He is the “Mr. Monopoly” of Thayer Street. To clear all misconceptions, he DOES NOT own Mike’s Calzones. However, he is the one behind your drunchies and hangover resurrections while owning Chinatown, East Side Pockets, and Baja’s. Archibald Basement: There’s nothing better than getting an indoor swimming pool from a natural disaster, right? Say it to the 37 displaced first-years whose rooms flooded this year. MoChamp Deer: I really do think this was God’s way of punishing the procrastinators trying to study the night before exams. Leave it to the MoChamp Deer to barge into the coziest study room on campus and wreak havoc as it trapped itself in the main vestibule. No animals were hurt, don’t worry. Hazeltine: I know in the way beginning I said I wouldn’t mention teachers, but when you see the 90 year old legend on a bicycle beating you to class, you know you’re at Brown.

Thanks, Mom

Deeya Prakash
October 14, 2022

It took me a long time to love to write. It used to be for the fun of it all, writing about talking fish and girls named Samantha, illustrating short stories about gummy worms with washable Crayola markers instead of doing homework, racing the clock to see how fast I could churn out a limerick about a blueberry tart. 5 minutes and 43 seconds, by the way. A record I would break with a poem about puzzle pieces. Writing was the gemstone I had hot-glued to my forehead—it sparkled and entertained, shining over the clinking silverware, occasional throat-clearing, and incessant small talk of an immigrant gathering. When Payal aunty asked how Neeti’s daughter spent her free time, Neeti nudged me slightly as I straightened and told Payal aunty that I wrote. My mother beamed with the shine of my poetry. It was funny. It was cute. It rhymed. She liked the way the light reflected around the room, the way people would notice and comment and praise. She told me to like it, too. So I did. And then I grew up—life extended its hand and I foolishly shook it; my eyes widened as I was yanked every which way, stretched too thin to stand. Soon, writing became a furious process, ink spilling, lead snapping, pencils sharpening until they were mere nubs in my fist. Notebooks were filled, Google Drive folders organized by 14 different colors, and fingernails bitten to the skin as I desperately tried to release myself from a deathgrip, hands bloodless from the pressure. Sentences flowed red from the scars on my wrists and the rust-coated swiss army knife I was forced to lock in the drawer beside me. Advertisement Writing was my soldier in a war with myself. Its shield was meager. My mind was stronger. And yet, the words won. I now have no choice but to write. I write with the reverence of a follower to his master, placing each letter as a blessing on the page. I write with nostalgia toward the patchwork quilt I helped my grandmother make in India. I write with the audacity of a child holding a pen and a latex balloon animal and claiming they’re an author, their experience a feather on the back of a peacock’s wing. I write like a disciple, the flashy gemstone evolving into a coveted heirloom as I worship words through the cracks in my keyboard and the worn fountain pen that I found in the parking lot of my highschool. I write because there is an urgent need within me to taste the unseen colors of the world around me and paint them on pages for others to discover. I write to document the way whipped cream melts on my sister’s nose and the way it hurts to watch my mother cry and the way they sky seems too good to be true on nights that are too good to be true because there’s an alternate world in which my life moved on before I knew how it felt to be truly alive. There is a parallel universe where my mind won. There’s a version where rust bled into my veins. I write because writing saved me. And maybe it can save someone else, too. My mother now shifts when she reads my writing. Sometimes, she doesn’t move at all. I poke her to make sure she’s still alive. It takes her a while to say something. She says she loves it, the way it is unapologetically a broken girl who is sifting through her father’s toolbox and hammering herself back together with the force of a lion. She tells me to love it, too. So I do.

A How-To Guide: Living in A Chronically Ill Body

Arden Reynolds
October 14, 2022

1. Levoxyl, 75 mcg The first thing you do upon waking is reach over to the bedside table, unscrew the clunky CVS bottle, and take out a smooth grey pill shaped like an hourglass (an unusual shape for a pill, but this is the *brand name*). You pay extra, both with time and money, to get this version, because you think it works marginally better, but maybe that’s just placebo. You likely don’t feel rested, even though you slept for nine hours (maybe more—you would easily sleep up to 14 hours a night if you could), and your brain is probably still foggy, but this medicine is supposed to help with that. Supposed to. As you shake out one pill from the bottle, you wonder how much the medicine really does, though, because you still have so little energy throughout the day. Most days you feel like Every. Single. Cell. in your body moves through molasses, each movement slow and draggy, heavy, as if you’re carrying around all that extra weight with you. Throughout the day, you marvel at how easily other people seem to do things like walk across campus to get to class. For most people, it seems so effortless, and yet when you walk the half mile and 2 flights of stairs to get to your English class in Smitty B 206, you wish you could sleep for at least an hour afterwards to recover. But you don’t get to sleep in class, so you spend the rest of your precious energy trying to keep the fatigue at bay and pull thoughts out of the molasses. By the time you leave class, you are utterly exhausted, and you start to count down the hours until you think it’s late enough to justify crawling back into bed. You think about all of this in the morning when you wake up, wonder how much the medicine really helps, and figure that—maybe—you would be even more tired if you didn’t take it. So you pop the pill into your mouth and down it with a swig of water. 2. Water, 8oz You drink this to ease the nausea that comes with waking up. It doesn’t matter what you’ve eaten the day before—it’s always there. It’s literally gut-wrenching, and it feels like everything in your stomach is spinning round and round and round, as if on a never-ending, slightly wobbly merry-go-around. It makes you dizzy. The glass of water slows the merry-go-round to a lilt, slow enough that you can go about your day without noticing it very much. After you’ve drunk the water, the nausea pales in comparison to the fatigue. 3. Prozac, 10mg Every morning, you debate whether or not you should actually take this medication. It works wonders with the anxiety. Without it, the voice of doubt in the back of your head never stops, commenting on your every action: – Wow, did you really just say “you’re welcome” when the cashier told you to “have a nice day”? – Maybe you shouldn’t have said that you’re only available on Wednesday afternoon. What if they need you Thursday morning too? Boundaries are important, but what if they cost you this relationship? – What if she thinks I’m needy because I texted her back too quickly? – Do you think I scared him off by telling him that I loved him too many times? With the medication, that voice gets quieter, comes less often. But the trade-off is that you think it makes the brain fog worse. The brain fog is the most debilitating aspect of your pretty debilitating body, and it makes everything difficult. It makes you feel discombobulated, like you’re not in your own body, that you’re simply floating above it and your body is going through the motions without you. At the moment, you take the prozac on and off depending on how clear-headed you feel in the morning. You’re pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that. 4. Yoga, >30 minutes You’ve had to stop running. You thought that you used to love running, but upon reflection, it was probably more of a compulsion than a passion. And so your body made you stop. When you ran, you used to get horrible headaches and fevers during and after the run. Yet you kept running for a long time. (Fatigue comes from the Latin roots “fatis”—break down—and “ag”—to drive/run. Thus fatigue literally means “to drive your body to the point of breakdown.” You have done this for who knows how long. Once you reach the point of breakdown, can you become unbroken? Or is there just dysfunction forever?) Now, though, you’ve finally listened to your body. Or at least you’re trying to. Yoga has been a reprieve, and you get to keep moving without destroying your body quite as much. Movement is a tricky one because you need exercise to have energy and feel good in your body, but when you do too much of it, you wear yourself out. A paradox. “Yoga” in Sanskrit means “unity.” The idea is that you practice movement in order to create unity between mind and body. You wonder how much of that is possible, because it feels like your body is constantly waging war, making it hard for your mind to be in union with your body. Or, more likely, it’s your mind who’s waging war. The rational part of your brain telling your body to do what it cannot realistically do, over and over and over, until breakdown. Running the extra mile because you said you would run 10 miles, regardless of how your body feels at mile 9. Following through on helping your friend move because you said you would, ignoring the fact that you feel feverish and achy and know that you’ll be knocked out for days to come. Saying yes to every opportunity that comes your way, even though your body begs you to say no, because otherwise you won’t feel like enough. That seems more like it. That your mind, your expectations for yourself, your ideas of success keep you from that union. (The roots of heal and healthy mean the same thing—whole. A healthy body is whole, in union.) You wonder what that would feel like, that sense of oneness. 5. OT/PT exercises “Trust that life is bringing what is next for you to learn” your counselor reminds you. Maybe the car accident and broken pelvis, the broken wrist, the infectious diseases can all be reminders for you to slow down. Maybe these things have come into your life as a way to force you to pay attention to your body, because otherwise you will not. (Why not? You don’t have time for that. Life is too busy to pay attention to yourself.) *** “I admire how little you let life slow you down when it comes to doing the things you care about,” your mentor comments a few weeks after you break your dominant wrist. He means it as a compliment. He is genuinely impressed that you have upheld all of your responsibilities, asked for no accommodations, not slowed down at all, despite the fact that it takes you an hour longer than usual to get showered and dressed in the mornings. At first you feel affirmed, but when you think about it longer, his comment worries you. Why can’t you slow down? Why won’t you ask for accommodations when life gets hard? Maybe because you like the feeling of gratification that comes when someone else notices you working hard. Maybe because you feel like your sense of self-worth comes from how much you can do—so much so that the cost of doing doesn’t matter. Maybe because you don’t know what to do with yourself if you’re not constantly busy. And so you continue to fill your Google calendar, leaving very little white space. Your broken wrist requires you blocking out many blocks of purple (the color for health-related activities, doctors’ appointments and OT and such. Your calendar always has several blocks of grape each week), but you just schedule these early in the morning so that you don’t need to cut down on anything else that you’re doing. Instead of slowing down, the injury actually makes your life busier. And you wonder why you haven’t felt good in months. Life might be bringing what’s next for you to learn, but you are stubbornly refusing to learn it. And your body pays the price. 6. Magnesium Taurate, 125mg You take this because one of your doctors recommended it to you. It’s hard to know who to trust when you have three different doctors who all tell you different things. It’s also hard to trust your doctor when you’ve had so many doctors who have led you astray, who’ve caused more harm than good with their endless prescriptions. Western doctors who have told you over and over (so much that you’ve internalized it) that there is something wrong with your body and that it needs to be fixed. Doctors who have told you that your under-active thyroid has nothing to do with your over-active digestive system, which has nothing to do with your painful menstrual cycle, and there’s no way to address all of these things at one time. Doctors who have told you that you are a “medical mystery” and that maybe your symptoms are really just in your head. Doctors who spend 5 rushed minutes with you in a white-washed, soulless room before recommending you an over-the-counter medication that you’ve already been using for years, a medicine that just addresses the symptoms and not the root causes. Doctors who have told you that your top priority of all of your health challenges must be to get you well enough so that you will be able to have children (when you tell him you don’t want children, he assures you that you’ll change your mind). But you want to understand your body better, to figure out things that you can do to feel better some of the time (often you also want to “fix” your body, because you’ve internalized that there’s something wrong). So you keep trying new doctors, hoping that some of them will be helpful, will have some insight that you can piece together on your own. It feels like trying to navigate a foreign landscape with a faulty compass, and you just have to hope that this time the compass will point true north. 7. Gan Mao Ling, 1140mg You take this because your best friend’s Jewish, Trump-supporting, Chinese-herbalist grandmother recommends it, and hey, why not try it? At this point, you’d try most anything. 8. Work, 2 hours After all this, you’re probably ready to start working. Do what you need to do early, cause you’ll likely run out of energy in a few hours. You can probably get in a good two hours before your body shuts down and you need to switch into full time care-taking mode again. The problem is, even when you have enough energy to sit down and start the work, the brain fog is still there. It is so hard to do the work that you’re expected to do at college when you can’t form thoughts coherently, because it feels like your brain is filled with wet cotton balls. In OT you did an activity with Theraputty where your therapist hid pennies inside putty. The putty was a bright teal color, as viscous as it could be without being solid. You dug through the putty with your semi-healed hand and pulled out the pennies one at a time. When you found the smooth surface of a coin, you grasped onto it with your thumb and forefinger (a grip that caused a jab of pain to shoot down your wrist), and teased it out slowly. The putty hung on in thin tendrils, and you had to pull the penny far out until the tendrils became thin enough that they snap, freeing the coin. A lot of days, this is how your brain functions. The pennies are thoughts, few and far between, and you must work diligently to pull them out of the putty of your brain. Assignments are hard to finish when they’re made from pennies. 9. Lunch, 2pm Exactly four hours after you’ve had breakfast, you’ll need to eat lunch. You can’t wait too long or the nausea will come back with a vengeance. Worse, though, is if you get too hungry you won’t be able to stay on top of your hunger for the rest of the day. Hunger feels like a snowball effect—it starts off as just a collection of a few snowflakes, and then it rolls and picks up speed and mass until it is way out of control and there’s nothing you can do but watch the snowball go careening down the mountain, destroying anything in its path. The problem is that sometimes you don’t notice the snowflakes accumulating until it’s too late, or sometimes you try to ignore the small snowball because you’re in the middle of class and you’re not supposed to eat. Sometimes you notice enough in advance, but you’re out and don’t have access to food that works for you (drug stores are sorely lacking in foods processed without soy). Ideally, you’d have prepped all of your meals for the week on Sunday, and have had the foresight to carry enough food around with you for the day. Often, though, you are too tired on Sunday to spend all day cooking, or you need to catch up on work and don’t feel like you can afford to take the time off. Or you’re rushed in the mornings because you woke up later than intended because you were tired because you had insomnia because you took an afternoon nap because you were tired. And so you often don’t have enough food with you, and the snowball gets away from you. This happens with lots of things—your body requires so much, and it’s hard to stay on top of everything you need to keep yourself feeling good. You feel like you have to be perfect in taking care of yourself or else you won’t feel good, but you’re not perfect all the time. You make mistakes: you forget food, you nap later in the afternoon than you’re supposed to, you forget to take medicines. You think that maybe being such a perfectionist might be a problem in the first place, because in striving so hard to be perfect you wear your body out. But you also want to feel good. You wonder what it might be like to just accept the fact that you have chronic illness, accept the fact that you won’t always feel perfect. What it would be like to accept the fogginess and fatigue instead of trying to fix yourself. Maybe you would live a lot more sustainably, because right now you’re operating according to how you could feel, rather than how you do feel. Acceptance—what a concept. 10. B12, 3000mcg The last time you didn’t take B12 for an extended period of time, you suddenly lost the ability to control your left hand. You remember lying on the couch reading a book, and when you went to turn the page, you couldn’t move your hand. The signals from your brain just no longer connected to your body. You freaked out and rushed to the Emergency Room, where they did an extensive slew of tests—ECG, bloodwork, cat scan. (Ironically, you freaked out when your body ignored signals from your brain. But every single day for as long as you can remember, your brain has overridden signals from your body. You’ve been carefully trained that these signals don’t matter, and are to be ignored. This doesn’t freak you out as much as it should.) You’ve been through this routine more times than you care to remember—countless ER visits because you didn’t know what was happening to your body, just knew that it was bad. Visits for paralysis, for mystery fevers, for fainting, for stomach pain, for heart palpitations. Each time (and at many regular doctor’s visits), you’re told that the tests show nothing wrong, that everything seems to be “normal”. You’re told that your symptoms can’t be explained, and so you walk out of the ER even more unnerved than when you walked in. What does it mean to have a body that no one understands? If your body can’t be understood, can you ever be seen? Can you ever heal? 11. Iron, 100mg For the anemia, which is just one more symptom that can’t be explained sufficiently. You’ve been taking iron for years and your levels are still lower than they should be. So you keep taking it and make peace with the mystery bruises that appear all over your body. 12. Vit D, 1000IU Does this help? Who knows? Also, what is an IU? 13. Omega 3, 1000mg You once read an article that said fish oil can cause cancer because it’s not regulated by the FDA most of the time. But, it’s supposed to help with immune function, and god knows you need that. You asked your doctor about the cancer issue and he recommended a brand that is supposed to be high quality, so that it doesn’t contain the carcinogens that fish oil from Walmart might. This fish oil he recommends comes in a carefully-crafted brown glass bottle that has heft to it, with a pretty floral design on the label. It stands apart from the other plastic bottles on your medicine shelf, and so carries (in your mind) some authority, some reassurance that it (probably) won’t cause cancer. It also costs $45 per bottle. $45 that you don’t really have, on top of the $70 copay for your weekly OT sessions, the $160/month for the holistic doctor, the $100/week for high quality food that meets your allergy needs. You still get a monthly bill (that you’re pretty sure you’ve paid) from Miriam hospital for $378 left over from your car accident in September of 2018, as if the other $20,000 in medical expenses wasn’t enough to pay on top of breaking your hip. It is expensive to be sick. So you feel pressure to work two jobs on top of your school work, to try to make enough to cover these doctors’ visits. Because taking care of yourself, even though it’s a full time job, doesn’t earn you money in this society. You wonder if maybe you would save more money by not working at all, because with more rest you might not need to spend as much on doctor’s visits. Maybe. 14. Nap, 20 minutes You know by now that you need to lie down and close your eyes at least once during the day. Ideally, you’d take a 20-minute rest after every “strenuous” activity (walking to class, class itself, socializing, working, doing laundry, going to the grocery store, walking up a flight of stairs, going to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy), but that’s not possible. You often are on campus in the middle of the day when you need to lie down, and going all the way home would wear you out more than rejuvenate you, so you find random places to nap on campus. On pulled-together chairs in an empty classroom in Page-Robinson. In the back of the stacks at the Rock. On a gross couch in the lounge of a dorm. On the carpeted floor of Barus and Holley with your beanie pulled over your eyes to keep out the fluorescent light. (You wish Brown had a nap room in the middle of campus you could go to.) You know that lots of college students sleep in all kinds of weird places, but you can’t help feeling embarrassed by lying down in public. You worry that people will judge you, or that people will think less of you if they know you can’t make it through the day without a nap (when other people nap, you assume it’s because they have a “legitimate” reason like only sleeping 2 hours, as college students are wont to do. But this logic doesn’t apply to you. You don’t have a legitimate reason, in your mind.). You worry a lot about being truly seen as you are in this body, worry that if people really knew how you felt most of the time, that they would think that you aren’t qualified for life at an Ivy League (or elsewhere). (This is projection—you worry that you aren’t qualified. You think frequently about what life you can have with this body. Will you be able to work? Are there any places that can accommodate you? Or will you have to live on a disability check if you don’t figure out how to feel better?) You worry that people will see you differently, will pity you. And you don’t want to be coddled, or receive sympathy. Your independence is important to you. (Why? Because you’ve been told to value it above all else.) You feel like you already ask for too much support when you’re really down and out (you’re trying to disentangle the idea that support is transactional or conditional, but that’s deeply ingrained), so you have to appear strong the rest of the time. At the same time, you so deeply long to be truly seen as you are. 15. Gratitude Journal, 15 mins You try to appreciate all the other wonderful parts about your life, even when your body makes life hard, so you spend the evenings (when you have enough energy) writing out things you’re thankful for. Sometimes, you even try to extend some gratitude towards your body. There’s a lot that your body does for you. Even when you don’t feel well, you live an incredibly full life, and your body takes you through all of that. She also is teaching you how to slow down (if only you would listen). You told your therapist that your body is the best accountability partner you could ask for on the journey to living a more sustainable life, and you meant it when you said it. Sometimes (often), though, you think that’s bullshit, and you wish you had a different body. 16. Zinc, 60mg There are so many supplements and medications and tinctures, and you have to take most of them separately. Fiber will block levoxyl absorption, iron will compete with zinc, magnesium and calcium don’t interact well. When you remember to, you check off each medicine dutifully on a big spreadsheet you keep in your notes app designed to help you keep everything straight. You also try to keep track of your sleep quality, your exercise, what you ate, your energy levels throughout the day, your mood, and your physical symptoms. Most nights, you open the spreadsheet for the first time when you take your zinc at the end of the day, and struggle to remember what you actually took (there are all sorts of reasons you don’t take all the medications you’re supposed to—you forgot to order them in advance so they’ve run out, you forget your pill box at home, you don’t want to pull out your big-ass pill box in front of your friends at lunch, you just forget). Later, though, the empty holes in the spreadsheet make it hard to draw patterns between the things that you do and the way that you feel. Are you tired because you forgot to take the B12? Because you exercised too much? Not enough? Because you couldn’t sleep? Figuring out the things that work and don’t work is hard when there are so many pieces (too many pieces for you to keep track of). 17. Valerian, 400mg Ironically, even though you have so much fatigue that all you can think about past 4pm is how long you have until bedtime, you often can’t fall asleep at night. You lay in bed for an hour or more, growing increasingly frustrated at the litany of thoughts your brain throws at you, compiling a giant to-do list that you doubt you’ll have energy to get to tomorrow. The valerian helps sometimes, but sometimes it’s not enough and you have to take something stronger. Your regular doctor (one of the three) recommends that you go to a sleep specialist to look into the insomnia and restless sleep. So now you add to your to-do list to find a sleep doctor in-network, make an appointment (probably for three months from now), and figure out a time to fit it in during the two weeks you’ve given yourself off for the summer (“breaks” are almost always filled with doctors appointments). You’re growing tired (but not tired enough to help you sleep, apparently) at having to see so many doctors, but good sleep would help a lot, so you add it to the bottom of the list. 18. Sleep, 8:30pm You know not to push this time. Go to bed later and you’ll wake up feeling exhausted tomorrow, no matter how long you sleep in. It doesn’t matter if your friends are having a get-together or your cousin is getting married or you have more work to do that you haven’t finished. You’ve learned the hard way that your body requires you to miss out on some of the traditional types of fun at college (the last time you drank alcohol you had an allergic reaction and fainted), but it’s still hard to drag yourself away from your living room while your roommates laugh loudly as they play Bananagrams. You wonder if maybe this causes the loneliness you often feel—the fact that you don’t have much overlap with most of your friends’ schedules, that you often have to say no to social events, that you can’t share a lot of experiences with them, that they can never really understand your experience of your body. Maybe that’s why, when you feel good, you try to be extra social, planning three or four social events in a day. You’re starting to realize that this much socializing might actually wear you out more than you thought, which means you might need to tone it down a bit. But that feels scary, because that means you have to be alone with your body. When you’re with other people, you can at least pretend to be distracted from the pain and the fatigue. As you drift off to sleep, your last thought is that tomorrow you will have to get up and do everything you did today all over again. Even thinking about it exhausts you. Appendix—contingent medicines to have on hand: Imodium, 6mg You carry a giant bottle of Imodium with you at all times for any time your stomach gets out of whack. This could be because you ate too many chickpeas or onions, because your period will start in anywhere between the next 2-10 days, because you’re stressed, or just because your gut feels like it. The last time you went to a GI doc to investigate why you need Imodium so often, and he told you (after a 3 minute conversation) that there was nothing wrong with taking Imodium as often as you want. “You can take up to 8 a day. So just do that. I see about 10 patients a day your age who have symptoms like you, and honestly there’s no way to cure IBS. But 8 Imodium should fix you right up.” He neglects to mention the bloating and discomfort that comes with taking Imodium, nor the unnaturalness of shoving 8 pills into your mouth just to get through the day. The appointment ends quickly, and you think you have a “solution,” so it’s not until later that you wish you’d thought to push back a bit more. To ask why, when he makes six figures a year and specializes in gastroenterology, that he doesn’t have a better option for all these young people who come into his office every day. To ask why he thinks so many people experience these symptoms, and if it has some correlation to rising anxiety levels. To ask him to spend more time with you and not give you a cookie-cutter bullshit option for “managing your symptoms.” To ask him why he gets to make so much money, gets to wear a white coat, when you actually know your body so much better than he does. All these questions don’t occur to you until much, much later, but you wished you had asked them. Ibuprofen, 600mg You don’t include this in your daily routine, but you might as well given how often you take it. You need ibuprofen to get through most days, to get through the tasks that this life you’ve chosen demands of you. You keep a bottle of ibuprofen with you in any place you might need it—your backpack, your purse, your car, your bedside table—so that you can quickly pop 2 or 3 pills (almost always 3, given the severity of your headaches). You do this so often that you don’t stop to think about it most of the time you take it (when you think about this, the lack of thinking terrifies you). All you think about is that you need to get to your next class and that you can’t justify skipping it because you’ve already missed too many classes and your professor might not like that (though you haven’t tried asking). So you take the pills. In this act, you are purposely ignoring your body’s inflammation (Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory), inflammation that might be an important message from your body about the pace of your life. A message from your body asking you to stop and think about what it means to have to recover from your day-to-day existence. Asking you to think about what it means that your life is so much, so overwhelming, so unsustainable, that your body is constantly inflamed. You wonder what would happen if you listened to this inflammation, if you tried to proactively keep it from happening rather than just addressing the symptoms. But that feels scary, because you’d have to do things very differently. If you really paid attention to your body, you wouldn’t be at Brown. You wouldn’t try to do 5 extracurriculars. You wouldn’t care about keeping your 4.0. Up until now, you’ve internalized that these external “successes” are worth more than your health. You’re starting to wonder if that’s true. Elix For the dysmenorrhea. This is at least an exciting condition, because the symptoms change every month. Sometimes you get nauseous and dizzy (sometimes with fainting), sometimes you get worse headaches, sometimes you get insatiably hungry (this is your favorite one because then you allow yourself to eat carbs with an abandon that you never do otherwise, because despite all your health challenges, you’re still concerned about your body image). You saw an advertisement for Elix in a YouTube yoga video and you thought you’d try it, along with acupuncture. Western medicine has pretty much failed you, has actively harmed you, so you’re branching out and trying some new things (though of course insurance doesn’t cover these “alternative therapies”). Both your online diagnostic test for Elix and your acupuncturist tell you that you have “stagnant qi,” which means that your energy is being stored in a place where it can’t be accessed. You do have energy in your body, they tell you; it’s just hiding away (maybe because you’ve scared it by asking for too much). And so there is no “problem” with your body, nothing to be “fixed.” There is simply a matter of redirecting energy. You like this framing of your body, but you find it hard to internalize.

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