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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

There are no cell phones allowed in rehab. If I want to make a phone call, I wait my turn at the bank of pay phones next to a stairway. I tuck myself inside, wrestle the folding door shut, and use an honest-to-god calling card. The receiver smells like an overflowing ashtray. Every conversation feels like a spotty satellite communication between far-flung planets.

There is no alcohol in the hand sanitizer, lest us addicts fasten our desperate mouths to the pump. We are required to squirt our palms as we enter the dining room, and the foamy substance just sort of smears around and around, it doesn’t evaporate. My hands feel dirty afterwards. It seems like some sort of ridiculous, industrial-cleanser-smelling metaphor.

By some stroke of luck I have a room to myself for the first two weeks, then a woman is moved in. She’s fresh out of detox, racked with withdrawals and a bevy of existing health issues. She is thin and bone-white and haggard and she has long dark hair that is perpetually wet-looking. She reminds me of an older version of the girl from The Ring, I am legitimately a little frightened of her. She’s a smoker, and there are no doors on the closet: her clothes smell so strongly of tobacco it makes my eyes water. She can barely walk or communicate. The first night, I wake to the stench of vomit. “I puked when I was asleep,” she says slowly. She forgets to flush the toilet, she leaves gobs of hair in the shower. I tell my group counselor about all of this and with a single phone call she has me moved to another room. I feel both ashamed and immensely relieved. Later, when I run into this woman at lunch, she has absolutely no idea who I am.

If we make our beds in the early morning like we are supposed to, an unseen cleaning person leaves a small foil-wrapped chocolate on our pillow. This is condescending as hell, I think, but also: ooh! Chocolate.

Once a week or so we are allowed to sign up for an outing to Rite-Aid. We are brought there in a van, we have twenty minutes to shop. I walk the brightly-lit aisles like it’s my first time in a developed nation, running my fingers over bottles and brushes. Some of the younger girls rush to the samplers, they paint their nails and spritz themselves with perfume. They buy boxes of forbidden candy and shove them down their pants. Back in rehab, we troop single-file to the counter where an employee sifts through all of our bags, confiscating the skin toners and mouthwashes.

Sometimes people just up and leave, and it’s weird. A guy gets kicked out for using Kratom. Another guy, his insurance runs out. A woman comes to one group session and never returns. One guy quits, then comes back a few weeks later: ashen, hollow-cheeked.

I become close with a woman named Sarah. We have giggling fits together, we talk about anything and everything, we actually spend an evening weaving friendship bracelets. When she graduates, I am bereft. In Augusten Burroughs’ addiction memoir Dry, he writes about meeting his friend Hayden in treatment: It’s the kind of friendship that’s easy to make in elementary school when you’re six or seven. (…) You will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve. Unless, it seems, you are forced into rehab.

Every morning, a group of us walks to the YMCA. We file past the front counter accompanied by our handlers, like children being brought to daycare. Some people play basketball and some head to the pool. Some of us go to the workout room where we lift weights, exercise some small necessary measure of control over our treacherous bodies, our restricted lives. It feels weirdly hopeful: everything has fallen apart, yet here we are, picking things up. Investing in something. We stare unblinking in the mirrors, trying to make sense of it all.

I pulled a weird, bad-form deadlift on Tuesday and my lower back has been lowkey complaining ever since, enough that I have to walk around with that overly-cautious pinching-a-turd posture to keep everything in exactly the right position and sit with a decorative pillow tucked behind me otherwise ow.

I do cat-cows and stretches nearly every damn day now, not because I am a limber sun-saluting earth goddess but because somewhere along the line that just became a Thing I Have to Do Because My Back is Kind of Permanently Grumpy.

My right elbow has this semi recent development where it hurts and doesn’t work right when I do weight-bearing exercises like pushups until it freakily pops into position. You can hear it: a sort of unpleasant click, and then it operates as intended. Like a car you have to jump start each time.

My knees bug me sometimes, like when I’m hiking downhill. Or uphill. Or sometimes just because. I switched to the elliptical at the gym because it feels like the least aggravating repetitive-cardio option, which sucks because 1) god, the elliptical is boring, and 2) those machines are positioned right in front of a bank of televisions playing daytime talk shows (including Dr. Oz, which is the hottest garbage that ever garbaged) and one that scrolls an endless series of “motivational” messages which includes, I am not making this up, a graphic that reads THE MORE YOU WORK OUT THE WEAKER HIS KNEES GET.

Oh, and a while ago I was standing in the kitchen — not slacklining or balancing precariously on a stool on top of a ball on top of a unicycle or gearing up to perform a crowd-pleasing triple axel: just STANDING THERE — and my left ankle suddenly collapsed outwards for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, which gave me a limp for three days.

In this scenario, I am both the tragically clumsy dudebro and the treadmill.

This is all to say that exercise is harder than it used to be, here in my mid-forties, and what’s really delightful is that the results are totally NOT as good. As in, would you like some batwing with that biceps? How about strong glutes that refuse to look like anything other than Squarepants Mom Butt? Remember when you could do a 20-minute workout video and cut out that extra daily box of Triscuits and you’d lose weight, well, now you have to take HIIT boot camp classes and live on cod smoothies to drop half a pound and if you even look at a carb out of the corner of your eye you go up two entire dress sizes.

On the plus side, I guess the main alternative to aging ungracefully is … death. So, there’s that.

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