I have decided to believe

on chronic pain

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Every prayer candle at the spiritual store in the Village was fully stocked except INTUITION, which had only one left.

As it happens, INTUITION is the prayer I was seeking. At another time in my life, I would have taken this as a sign. Just one, just for me. Now, I look at the candle and share a smile with myself. Praying for intuition is like praying for atmosphere; it’s always there, even when we can’t sense it. But the candle is like the wind, permission to feel.

At another time in my life, I might have been happier, believing that a guardian angel had sent me a candle. Now, I think about how many have stood here, wanting to believe like me. Is it better to feel this sort of emptiness, knowing it is shared? I’m not sure. I turned the candle around and noticed that it was $23. At another time in my life, I would have walked it up to the register, been taken aback by the price, and purchased it anyway. That kind of belief is costly.

Though, far be it from me to turn my nose up at a prop for enlightenment. I used to think that cigarettes relaxed me, and now I believe that I am more relaxed without them. The cigarette is still the prop, this time reified through abnegation. My response unsettled me. Surely, it was simpler when I embraced synchronicity and saw myself as uniquely blessed. Perhaps the reason I’ve been having trouble with my intuition is precisely that I’m psychoanalyzing the fucking prayer candles instead of simply lighting them and taking a deep breath! I don’t think I was smarter at 23. But maybe that’s the point.

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I have decided to believe in needles. I’m scared of needles, but I’m more scared of being in pain forever. Sandra told me about a Chinese medicine doctor off Canal Street who takes my insurance. What’s been happening to me is that the forefinger and thumb of my right hand, in addition to a decent part of my right arm, have been numb for months.

I know it is a pinched nerve. I know this because my body pinches them all the time, especially in times of stress. It always happens on my right side, which, according to Chinese medicine, is the side of masculine energy. For my birthday, I saw an astrologer who told me that, in every life before this one, I was a man. This makes sense to me for reasons I can’t quite explain, potentially because, upon closer inspection, the “reasons” are probably bio-essentialist nonsense I absorbed from The Bible and Instagram Reels. But still, it feels nice to believe that I’m in pain because I’m being a woman wrong, or that womanhood is a wrong condition that causes pain.

The Chinese medicine doctor didn’t tell me that I have a wounded Feminine. He told me to stop going on my laptop in bed at night, and then he put 10 needles in my body, plus a few electrodes on the back of my neck. He thinks that I pinched a nerve by looking at my phone and laptop, even though I have several books at home which say that I pinched a nerve due to my body’s refusal to process repressed emotions.

I grow bored of looking at the wall, I pick up my phone. I realize that my neck has fallen in precisely the way the doctor had mimicked for me earlier, when he said that many young people have this problem due to phones and laptops. I put my phone down.

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I am scared of needles, which is why I think acupuncture may work for me. Though my father bucked his Southern Baptist upbringing (in favor of edgy Atheism which eventually smoothed out into casual Buddhism), my body remembers believing that a meaningful reward must lie on the other side of all this pain. Which of course means that pain must occur in order for good things to happen, and in this way, we must appreciate pain.

I don’t like regarding pain this way. I think the point of pain is the pain and its sensation (as opposed to penance for expected pleasure, the emotion for which feels something more like anticipation or being horny). The refusal to look pain in the face is how repression happens, how fear gets trapped in the body, how my arms and legs go numb. Almost everything you could possibly think to do in your human day involves not directly facing pain — mindless routine, distracting circumstances like working and loving people, soothing yourself with beverages or drugs or beverages with drugs in them — up to and including actively wishing for an end to pain. Even so, one is supposed to face the pain. This is the noble answer.

The true one, however, is that I don’t believe in pain as a bump on the road to superior emotions like joy and peace because I don’t consider joy and peace to be the superior emotions.

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A few weeks ago, I tweaked my back on a deadlift and got so desperate to end my pain that, even though I feared it would unleash latent and lifelong schizophrenia immediately, I broke my 5-year hiatus from weed.

The problem is that weed used to be bad, which was good because I was a teenager. I bought pure shake and shambles from whoever would sell it to me and faced a blunt that left me sober enough to drive to the strip mall. Then weed got better, which was bad because it was actually just a trial phase for the real super-weed that would develop in a few years. During this time, weed started to make me feel like my friends could see into the depths of my soul, which they found to be impossibly, almost hilariously barren, and also that I was peeing myself in public. I stopped smoking.

Now weed is really good, and I’m an adult who lives in a state with dispensaries. The weed is so good now that they even figured out how to make it not scary. I am taking tiny bites of a vegan, balanced 10:2 THC:CBD gummy. I wish I could clap my hand on the back of my stoned nineteen-year-old self, who would probably react as though it was a grenade going off in Vietnam, and say: Welcome to the future.

Immediately, weed started to ease my pain — both physical and emotional. There’s a little person that runs around in my mind trying to manage ever-perpetual disasters, and weed tucks her into bed.

In December, I experienced some kind of emotional crisis, during which this little person was certain that my landlord would refuse to renew our lease again. The signs were there: he’s old, he’s suggested that we relocate rather than ask for trash bins one more time, he’s moved his daughter into the remaining apartment, making us the only people in the building who are not directly related to him. I began to dream about paperwork that evicted us. I dragged Max all across Brooklyn to showings of uglier, smaller apartments¹ before asking our landlord about the lease termination he suggested, at which point he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about.

I was so dumbfounded that the landlord didn’t actually want us to leave that he mistook my incredulity for wariness and offered to stabilize our rent. Accidental win for insane girls, I guess.

The lease on this place is the only one I’ve ever renewed. It’s the only one I’ve even stayed all the way through the first time. I love it deeply and fear losing it constantly. Apparently, it is possible to be avoidantly attached to your apartment.

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I started taking the edibles. I was drawing long baths and spending hours decoding my Tarot deck. I slept better. I drew a picture for the first time in years, just because.

one of the best albums ever

And then, when I was sober, that little person got out of her bed and asked when and how exactly we should plan to get rid of weed forever, since it was clear we were loving it so much.

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“Musician, huh?” the Chinese medicine doctor said, turning over my hand. “Guitar?” I nodded. “This numbness must make it hard to play.”

He’s right. The numbness makes it hard to play. A few weeks ago, I was asked to open a Bernie Sanders rally with a few songs, an offer I immediately and happily accepted. The preceding days were full of anguished rehearsal, shaking out my hands and beating them against hard surfaces, willing the nerve endings to cooperate with my brain. I kept dropping the pick. I kept crying.

Sometimes I worry that I might be secretly stupid because my dreams are so ham-fisted. My subconscious, freed from the constraints of the real world and human language, presents to me clear images of things that represent obvious fears and have mostly already happened to me: being home alone with my mother while she’s in psychosis, forgetting the words to a song on stage. The nerve pain lets me know that my body is actually very smart.

It came on soon after I left the job that made me money for the famously gruelling and woefully underpaid pursuit of indie music. Certain bets had to be hedged — one day I might break into the alternative mainstream, one day I might afford to feed myself from music. Other bets I hadn’t even considered, those that I had registered as sheer fact, like I bet that I will still be able to sing. I bet that my hands will still work.

The safe path would have been to keep my job, and my body knows this. It doesn’t like this freedom, my conviction that led me away from certainty and towards beauty and truth. My body has fallen through the floor hundreds of times. My body lies awake and worries about money, even though my favorite thing is sitting in the creek. My body would rather cling to the wall than let go and hit the bottom, where it might wait forever for the bottom to fall out of the Earth.

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Here’s how I know that I don’t find joy and peace to be the superior emotions.

Because they end. Pain is unrelenting, everywhere. When there is nothing to think of, pain contemplates. If I am without company, pain always comes. Joy is a slight silver fish, so quick it could be confused with the reflection of a passing current. Pain is unmistakable.

Perhaps it’s an act of love to believe that the state which is truly unavoidable must be the most meaningful. Perhaps belief itself is a kind of love.

Kazimierz Stabrowski, Angel & Monsters, 1920

1. and one exceedingly beautiful place in Greenpoint, the current tenants of which should reflect on their blessing