"one sick puppy"
How would I get health insurance? How could I see my therapist, my psychiatrist, my GI? How could I go anywhere without my low-FODMAP spice rack?
(this one’s for the Freunden who’ve been asking—a look at this little life since i left LA)
I’ve fantasized about a specific trip since my late teens: I box everything up, put it in storage, pick three selective outfits and a handful of books to throw in my car, and I just go. Six months, one year, drive across the country—a country I’d lived my whole life in but was barely familiar with.
Write a memoir. Write about queer life and communities across the states (been done). Crash at different co-ops. Get an America the Beautiful pass and crash at national parks. Crash at friends’ houses. Drive to or through every state, strategically for the weather. Shoot a million rolls of 35mm film. If I like a city, stay for a while. Get a cafe job. Get a substitute teacher job. Get a flying trapeze job. Settle in, pack up, move.
Then no one would go with me, and I thought: what if I get deep lonely or sad? Then my stomach started to rule my schedule and I thought: how can I go six months without a kitchen, without safe food? Then I started prescription medication and I thought, what if I run out? And then, I started moving, and I got episodes, and flare-ups, and injuries, and specialists, and didn’t have health insurance, and was moving anyway, and I thought: when will I let myself stay long enough in one city to just get off the wait list for another fucking colonoscopy?
I didn’t think I would stay in LA past June, let alone for four years. My first week, wandering the streets of Westwood, I couldn’t stop thinking: I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a mistake. In the Trader Joe’s, trying to stock my shelf in the pantry for the first time, all I wanted was peppermint tea to calm my stomach, but it was on the top shelf, and I didn’t know if my body was ready to reach yet after surgery. I reached anyway, and felt a tug in my chest, splitting open part of the wound, making a keloid that no scar tape ever managed to push back down.
I stayed in LA past June, and I stayed longer. I went to grad school, I dropped out of grad school. I got an associates in a completely different field, then left that field. I worked a million jobs. I found new joys. I weathered a pandemic in a studio apartment. I started grad school, again, elsewhere. I made friends—brilliant, hilarious, life-changing friends. I built community. I was known. I dated; I fell in love. I didn’t make a mistake.
As I left the city for the last time, it didn’t hit me that I was leaving until I reached the section of the 5 where my radio presets no longer worked. For the next few miles, I drove north, watching the swallows come back to roost at sunset under the freeway overpasses, proud of the life I had built in this strange, agonizing, beautiful city that I was letting fall behind me in static.
The 5 took me to San Francisco. Pulling up to my first summer sublet, three years of LA studio living crammed in my 2011 Toyota Prius, and one of the housemates shakes their head while helping unpack the car and says So much stuff! I get into my room and only a sixth of my clothes fit in the tiny closet and I think, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a mistake.
My body echoed that back to me: I crashed. I got sick, like, really really sick. A day of molasses-muscles, stuck on the couch. Then, my weeklong migraine. My three Tylenol mornings. My everything flare-up, old sprains suddenly remembered, body exhausted, digestive system freaking out, barely able to get out of bed. Crying on the psychiatrist’s Zoom call.
I had played with the word Sick before (capitalized), and this June it really felt real. My body, my illnesses (both diagnosed and not) stomping on the dog leash as I strained to move, go, do, train, fly. I never knew (and still don’t) if I could identify as Disabled. Whether I could—or if someone granted me—permission to or not, it didn’t feel right (like how it doesn’t feel right to identify as POC, even though others have done it for me, since I’m half-Iranian; or as trans, even though I technically am, being non-binary).
But I knew I was Sick when I was seventeen. Wanted to become a wilderness backpacking guide but then thought: can I be responsible for a group of people in the backcountry when I might need more help myself? Thought about it when I studied abroad in Mexico City, toiletries and medications taking up a third of my suitcase, my dad looking at the plastic pile and calling me “one sick puppy,” pulling me in for a hug.
Thought about it when I moved to LA, when I moved to San Francisco, every time I move: will my illnesses let me do this? June, San Francisco, I laid down on the floor, clothes &meds &heating pads all boxed up around me and thought, I’ve made a mistake.
But I hadn’t. Summer in San Francisco was a Panettone color palette, the blues and grays of the morning fog fading into the explosive rainbow of the Mission and the Haight. I subleased a room in a co-op close to Golden Gate Park, then a room in a co-op even closer. Both houses made me feel welcome and worthy in a way I thought—after three years of living alone and years of difficult roommate situations before that—never would be possible.
I worked only one job at a trapeze rig and did so little in my spare time that it felt weightless. I stayed sick, got injured, slowly got off waitlists to see doctors. I learned to juggle. Jogged around the Panhandle. I was back home, biking through the city I had BARTed into or been driven through so many times as a child, hair wet from lost high school swim meets. I met up with old friends, passed vaguely-familiar classmates in the street, made new connections—fleeting, with the promise to return—feeling this resonance like, from here I came and to here I return. I dated long-distance, I could have fallen in love; but we kissed hello and goodbye one weekend at SFO, and then ended it. I was still moving. It was a hard summer, but I had a great time—the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I didn’t want to leave, but I did. Packed everything back up into the Prius and stored what I could at my parents’ home, donated the rest. Winnowed it down to a backpacking backpack, a suitcase, and my folding bike; got on a plane from SFO to JFK. Moved, again.
New York in September is seductive. Everyone is wearing new Birkenstocks, and not even the blisters hurt. My first night, I hopped on my folding bike and pedaled down from Sheepshead Bay to Coney Island, riding back in the rain, thinking, I’ve made a really good choice. The first time I moved to a new city and didn’t immediately think, I’ve made a mistake.
Even though my health insurance wouldn’t kick in until October. Even though I didn’t yet have a job, or classes, or any schedule I needed to follow. Even though the fridge was empty, and I didn’t know where to go to fill it.
Maybe because I know how to live in a city now; because I’m old enough to know how hard it can be, but also to know the tricks to making it easier; maybe because I hit the ground now looking for doctors and pharmacies; or because the Prozac makes me not stress out as much about every little thing anymore.
It’s been a month since I landed in New York and I don’t want to leave, but I’m going to. I’m subletting an apartment in South Brooklyn that’s draped in patterns and making me rethink my entire aesthetic life. Come November I’ll be by Prospect Park in an apartment with a mosaiac accent wall, making up for all the years I spent by myself in white-walled white-linened rooms. I found my dream doctor team, feeling hope for a diagnosis for the first time in years, and am just crossing my fingers it’s all covered by insurance like they told me it would be.
I volunteer at the bike co-op. I’m auditing a German class, do my Hausaufsgaben on the train. I go to staff training at a new trapeze rig, sometimes sub classes. Reading, writing, cooking, juggling. Simple, slower, weightless life. Still Sick, but somehow doing just fine.
I still want to drive across the US. Still want to pick up and live in Paris, or Mexico City, or fuck it, Ohio. Still don’t want to let being Sick hold me back. But I know that it’s easy enough to settle in now, until an emergency. A need.
When you move to a new place, where do you go to read? Where do you go to buy gluten-free cookies? What’s the best bike route at 11 o’clock at night when your brain itches and you can’t sleep and you have to just move move move? (Elysian Park, USC Trader Joe’s, DTLA to Echo Park Lake)(Golden Gate Park, Mariposa, GGP to the beach)(Finally your own couch, give up sugar, Coney Island Boardwalk)
It’s one thing to move within the continental US every one-to-three months (my M.O. for the past five); it’s another to move every few weeks, or move internationally; and it’s entirely another to attempt to do either while also needing regular medical care. I didn’t think that being Sick would affect me until I realized I would never be able to travel like I had planned in my teens. How would I get health insurance? How could I see my therapist, my psychiatrist, my GI? How could I go anywhere without my low-FODMAP spice rack?
I’m at this strange crux of letting my illness, injuries, and body stop me from my forward momentum, and stubbornly continuing to push my body onward, telling myself I won’t let my limitations hold me back—especially since I don’t know what those limitations are yet. I’ve given myself the deadline of my MFA graduation—this upcoming July—to finish moving around and make some hard decisions.
For now, I’ll still be filling 3-month prescriptions at the pharmacy, hoping for a diagnosis that might lead to a treatment. Packing, unpacking, loading up the car. Tugging at the leash, but trying not to stray too far.