12. Immune
A thousand tiny cuts
In this issue: too many boxes, drama camp, and guitars
I hadn’t even shut the drawer under my bed very hard, but it was heavy and my fingers were not quite out of it. I yelped, and shook my hand, rushing out of the room to answer the doorbell. I buzzed Betül in, and then leaned against the wall. Ow. Ow. Fuck, ow, why was it hurting so much? I opened the apartment door so she’d be able to get in, and then went into the bathroom to run my finger under cold water. Two of the sensations I feel like I’ve come to recognise very gradually over the course of my adulthood are the feeling that I’m about to throw up, and the feeling that I’m about to pass out. This felt like both. But I barely even shut my fingers in it, why does it hurt so much?
“Hello?” My apartment is on the fourth floor, so it takes a while to get up the stairs.
“In here. I shut my fingers in the drawer.” I was crouched on the bathroom floor, my right hand still dangling in the sink under the running tap.
Betül came in. “You need ice.”
“Maybe,” I said. “You’re probably right.” I looked at my fingers. I couldn’t tell what was going on under the gold nail polish, but the rest of them looked okay. A bit swollen perhaps. Betül returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a tea towel.
“So you don’t burn your skin,” she said.
“Burn skin, right,” I responded woozily, “Let’s, I need to sit down.”
Hello, you’re not going to pass out because you shut your bloody fingers in a drawer for goodness’ sake. I stared at my hands. Right hand. Damn. The one that couldn’t afford to be injured for very long. Why are our fingers so sensitive when we need them for so much?
I tapped the fingertips of my left hand together, out of newly-acquired habit. The left thumb against each of the fingers – one-two-three-four. They’re weirdly numb and stiff, as though I always have candle-wax tips on them, because I bought a steel-string guitar in July and I’ve been playing it almost every day since. One-two-three-four.
“Caitlin keeps asking me whether the fingertips on my left hand are like, different because of playing the guitar,” Julian is saying. “And I don’t think they are, but I also can’t tell because they just feel like how they always feel.”
We’re in a bar near my house, after the cinema. He holds his hands out again, and we all compare.
“I think they are different.”
“You have to like, use the same thumb for both hands.” Rebekka demonstrates.
He tries it. “Huh, maybe they… maybe they are after all.”
We are talking – Liz, Rebekka, Julian and I – about sympathy and empathy, although those aren’t the words we are using. We’ve just watched Supernova, and it was very, very good.
“But if I’m feeling sad about that story,” says Julian, “it’s not because I’m feeling the sadness of my partner having dementia as though that were happening to me. I’m feeling sad because that’s a sad thing – that I haven’t experienced.”
Rebekka and I look at each other. “No, I feel the sadness of putting myself like, into his shoes and eyes, I imagine it as though it were happening to me,” I say, and she nods in agreement.
“But isn’t it kind of… reductive, to pretend that I can understand what that feels like? Like, for instance I can be sad about the fact that so many people have to seek refuge because of war, but isn’t it kind of arrogant to assume that I can imagine what it would feel like to have to flee my home?” Julian continues.
I consider this. “I get your point, it’s a good point. But even though I know I can’t fully understand what it’s like, the act of really trying to imagine it is what makes me feel connected to the person I’m trying to relate to.”
“Well,” says Liz, “I think I’m like Julian in this. Especially since I began studying and working in the field of refugee law, it just feels like I can’t afford to internalise everything in the same way, it would be too overwhelming. You have to find a way to be able to get through it all.”
All of us have been fiddling with the candle in the middle of the table, which is rapidly losing height and taking on interesting shapes. In parts we’ve dug away at the wax, and in parts we’ve reinforced it by sticking extra bits on. I think about the idea of becoming immune to a feeling. The candle wax on my fingers peels off, but the calluses don’t. They’re there because I’ve injured myself in very small ways, over and over, and the body responds and adapts.
I’m lying on the couch-futon in the corner of my room, and Betül sits beside me. The ice pack on my fingers is starting to melt. I still feel sick.
“So you got through most of the boxes?” she says, looking around.
They were boxes that had been in storage back in Australia – some of them had things I hadn’t looked at in ten or fifteen years, some with things I hadn’t really seen since I was a child and someone had put them into a box for safekeeping. I’d filtered briefly through many of them when I was in Newcastle two years ago, but had run out of energy and time to do an exhaustive clean-out. There were eight in all, and only one left to unpack.
The first seven I’d tackled a week and a half earlier, when they arrived. I’d just torn off the tape and started sorting, picking up school reports and old craft projects and endless birthday cards, diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper with my school friends’ handwriting all over them. A letter from my ex, during the month we couldn’t see each other. The paintings that prompted my art teacher to call my parents to check if everything was alright at home. Printed emails from a family holiday, short stories and plays, photo albums from the trip to England I took when I was 13. Tiny half-melted wax figures I’d made twenty years ago. A small gift from a family friend who’d once made me uncomfortable in ways I had trouble processing. Notes I’d written to myself when I first started dealing with depression. I read through everything.
By 7.30 that first evening I was lying incapacitated on the floor of my hallway, texting Robin and asking for help. I’ll be there in half an hour, they replied immediately. They came over and helped me throw away box after box, and held me on the couch while I cried for a while.
“You really just went into it all, huh? Just gave yourself the full blast of childhood trauma in one go,” Robin said, rubbing my back.
One of the things I found was a notebook I’d taken with me to camp, two years in a row. The camp was a “gifted and talented” thing for primary school kids, and both years really stuck in my memory, so it was truly wild to read back over what 11- and 12-year-old me had decided to document. Both years begin with me describing some terrible thing going on just before the camp begins. The first year, my father’s engagement at the time was broken off the day before I left for camp – an event I began describing with the words
“Sunday, 20/08/00.
Dear Diary,
STRESS!!”
Which – points for a succinct topic sentence, baby Caitlin! It’s so bizarre and tender to see one’s own hectic childhood handwriting trying to capture a big feeling, using alarming amounts of experimental punctuation (inspired by a steady diet of newspaper comic sections and the sort of kids’ novels with drawings and jokes in the margins) and a limited understanding of your own internal world. It is also deeply heartening that three days later, the entry reads (a little confusingly), “Dear Diary, I think that this week has been the best past few days of my life so far.”
I can’t tell if that’s some insight into the resilience of kids, or whether it’s more about the way that when things are going badly, a reprieve from the everyday feels just so much better. The second year’s camp sticks in my head, not because of the bad thing that happened beforehand (a beloved family member died of pancreatic cancer, and it had created a deeply volatile mood at home), but because of the classes I took while I was there. The year before I’d gone for English, but this year I was there for Drama, and I was extremely psyched.
I remember the first class so well, it had a well-established place in my head even before I read the diary entry.
I’m describing it as “weird”, but what I remember is the teacher putting on some very dark and menacing music, splitting us into two groups, and telling us to prepare for battle – collect and don our armour, pick up our weapons, and go out to fight for our leaders. Unsure, we began. The music was slow, so by unspoken consensus we all moved in slow motion. Piece by piece we fixed invisible sections of armour to our bodies, occasionally turning to help the person next to us, until eventually we self-consciously looked around at one another, miming huge heavy swords dragging behind us as the music swelled.
And then suddenly the teacher let out an absolutely blood-curdling scream and ran across the room with his arms raised together above his head. The room full of serious, concentrating 10- to 12-year-olds collectively startled like a flock of pigeons. And then all at once we joined in, screaming and running at one another. The moment in which we all jumped in fright is in my head forever: it was pure catharsis, slicing the tension at the same time as it plunged us fully into the imagined world of the battlefield. I remember nothing about Nathan, except that fighting him felt like an act of absolute trust at the same time as I was absolutely determined to destroy him. That class sticks out as the moment I realised that getting to play unknown people, impossible situations, was an opportunity to access very real feelings in myself in a way that felt safe.
We had the conversation a few times, back in the lockdown months.
“I just think it’s very cool that the brain learns how to do things better,” Julian says to me. “I mean, how does it do that? Like, the more I practice guitar, the better I get at it, but it’s not like a conscious process – so how does that happen?”
It is late, and there is only light from the television screen and from the street lamps outside.
“I guess the brain gives itself some kind of feedback when it gets things wrong, and then learns from that?” I venture.
“But that doesn’t make sense – it’s not like you have to try all the wrong ways of doing something in order to find the right one. That might be a small part of it, but it doesn’t explain the whole thing.” He is holding his guitar, fingers finding the frets.
“So maybe the positive feedback is more potent? Like, when you do something and get it right, that clicks into some bit of the brain that’s like – do that more?”
He considers this. “Maybe.”
I started writing this entry weeks and weeks ago, when I was still pushing through a dim haze of listlessness, spending days on end curled in bed watching a series I discovered a couple of months back called Dimension 20. It’s a series where you basically just watch a bunch of very funny and clever people play Dungeons & Dragons, and it completely enveloped my brain. Because a lot of it involves theatre of the mind – that is, you’re seeing people act out characters and there are some visual cues, but a lot of the action has to take place in your own imagination – it activated the corners of my brain that badly miss acting.
From the surface of my skin outwards, I was fully engulfed in the familiar waters of depression, brought on by several weeks of Simply Too Much: a background hum of all these boxes of memories, overlaid by other difficult things happening. I was smaller inside myself, at a distance from the world, unable to feel the bright cords connecting me to other people around me, the cords that normally pulled me through my life.
But within I was still feeling things, watching this series. The first season involves a bunch of teenagers, who all have different relationships with their parents – and I was completely absorbed in the dynamics playing out. Different kinds of scripts to the ones I was used to, different options for conflict resolution, different choices being made. It is important that you know that these kids are elves and orcs and goblins in a high-low fantasy hybrid world, living out a John Hughes-esque high school comedy. And yet it is hard to describe the combination of feeling something hard and real and vivid in me yearning so powerfully, at the same time as feeling a kind of pragmatic equipping, a kind of healing. Please talk to me about Fantasy High if you’ve watched it, it’s simply all I want to talk about sometimes.
One difficult thing, in early September: a man I’ve known at an acquaintance level for a couple of years lost his temper at me, and threw a tantrum in public on an evening where I was already stressed out. I stood my ground, but my bodily reaction shocked me deeply, bringing on sweat and trembling for hours afterwards. Strangers told me I looked stressed. I called my brother at 4am and cried over the phone, across the world. I stopped going to my usual activities.
Another thing, at the end of September: Julian moved to Munich, which I’d been anticipating with such sadness and happiness at once. It is good and terrible for things to change. It is completely necessary and totally wrenching. The last time he moved away from a city we both lived in, five and a half years ago, I was gripped by the fear that we would drift out of each other’s lives as a result. We didn’t. He was sad and stressed about this move. I have moved cities so many times in my life; he has not. It has always turned out okay. I have the tools to fit this into my head in such a way that things turn out okay.
Another thing, in mid-October: I caught the first cold I’ve had in two years, and it flattened me out entirely. It was a relief. Suddenly I actually needed to stay in bed just sleeping and watching the show that hit the good corners of my brain, instead of merely doing so by default. I also couldn’t breathe or swallow, and my body had totally forgotten how to cope with illness. I used to get sick pretty regularly. I used to work through it, continue going about my life. That’s not a script I am willing to follow anymore. Perhaps I’m simply not able to.
I have had my booster shot against Covid, and my flu shot as well; I got them while I was sick last month. I’m flying to New York tomorrow, because in the midst of the grey-green sea of haziness in September, I bought flights. I’ve never been to the States before. I wanted to make sure I’d be as fully vaccinated as possible, partly in case anyone at the border had questions, and partly because travelling still seems so daunting.
Vaccines work because they put our body through difficult things safely, and our body learns how to deal with them. Sitting woozily in the doctor’s office after getting my negative PCR test results, I wondered whether getting more shots (a flu shot then; a booster a week later) was a good idea right at that moment, when my body was already fighting off something else. Nobody seemed to question it. I was already planning on spending the following days in bed anyway. The important thing was that my immune system learn how to go through a tough time, and come away from it equipped. That’s not always how things go – not everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes they just create delicate points of pain that can knock you out with barely a nudge.
Isn’t that incredible? You either come away stronger or more vulnerable, as though your roof sprang a leak during a storm. You either find a way to fix that roof right now, or the next time the whole thing’s coming down on your head.
Betül and I go through the last box quickly. My finger still throbs. The ice is long gone. It’s late September. I am glad she’s here with me; I always feel better after we spend time together.
We sort through jewellery and knick-knacks – things to keep, things to store under my bed, things to get rid of. Everything I don’t want to keep goes into a cardboard box marked “Zu Verschenken”: an old coin collection, photo frames, a broken music box, the paintings my art teacher was so concerned about. We take it out into the street, and leave it on the corner on our way to get dinner. On the way home, most of the things are gone. By the next day, the box is gone too.
Hey pals, it’s so good to see you all again. I hope you’ve been okay these last few months. I’ve been doing a couple of other things than simply being sad and watching Dimension 20 – I also wrote a song about how I’d been sad and watching Dimension 20! I put it up on Instagram here:
I actually also released my first ever single, which is an amazing thing to be able to say. It’s called Swallowing Stones! I think it sounds really really good, but I feel like you should probably listen and check that it’s a good song just to be sure (and then get all your friends to check that it’s a good song too, we have to be scientific about these things):
Speaking of sharing things, I think for the first time I’m kind of ready for a wider range of people to read Figs for Breakfast too. I’ve been a bit hesitant about it in general, but I got such a lovely comment a month ago from a reader I’ve never met (thank you, Peter!), and it was really nice to think about other people enjoying my writing. So maybe you’d like to share this edition (or perhaps you have a different, favourite past edition of Figs) with someone you think would like to read it? That would be pretty cool.
You can share things with me too! I would especially love recommendations for good neighbourhoods to go walking around in NYC, if you know of any. Otherwise maybe just tell me how you’re doing? Shoot me an email or leave a comment, you know how this works:
Alright I have to go finish packing, hopefully next Figs will have some fun travel stories in it. If you want to make sure it’s in your inbox, you can sign up (for free!) right here:
1) You're welcome!
2) Great issue. As always, I'm going to be ruminating on these topics for quite a while.
3) If you go to Brooklyn, there's a sandwich place called Hungry Ghost which does the best sandwiches I've ever had. Also, it's immediately across the road from the best doughnuts I've ever had. It's a good place for a meal, basically.
If you don't go to Brooklyn, those places are still there. They're just less relevant.