On Awareness

I’m super-excited to be a presenter at Barrelhouse's Conversations & Connections conference this Saturday, where I’ll be leading a session on metaphor. The conference is currently sold out, but look for the autumn edition for another chance to attend this wonderfully cordial conference.

I’m writing to you from the sofa, where I’m enjoying the first generally pain-free days of the past six weeks. At some point at the end of February, I did something to my back—not entirely sure what, as I never had a sudden pang or twinge, but rather a stealthy, tender stiffness that progressed rapidly to the kind of spasming pain that saw me spend two weeks pacing and panting like a caged thing and mostly unable to have two coherent thoughts in a row1. There were four (mostly inconclusive) doctor’s visits over the next full month. I’m still waiting for the results of an MRI; I’m in the midst of my first-ever bout of physical therapy. At least something has improved, and I’m trying not to question it too much.

And yet, I wouldn’t be a writer if I wasn’t interested in questioning things. And since it’s not presently in my own power to know, definitively, what the problem is, what spurs me now is the question of awareness.

I teach on a college campus, where we do so much around the topic of awareness for a multitude of causes. Student groups sell pins and ribbons and ribbons you can pin onto other things. We hold workshops and educational sessions and invite guest speakers because problems have to be identified before they can be solved. We try to decrease stigma; we try to increase dialogue.

All of this awareness-raising is organized around pain points: the pain of diseases without cure, the pain of people without the resources they need. We do what we do because we live in hope that when we know better, we do better. If we are aware, we won’t simply ignore the issue.

(Five minutes of current events casts a sobering shadow on all of that, I know.)

That same sense of awareness lodges in the body: a response to pain. The body is trying to send a message of stop x or start y. (Or the pain is some secret third thing, which is beyond my scope here.2) But, broadly, by lighting up those nerves, the body makes one aware. And when there’s an injury, that awareness lingers, even after the healing may be registered as complete.

In August of 2021, I developed Achilles tendonitis after what seemed to me an incredibly average bit of running. I spent a month in a boot and a few months doing specialized stretches and strengthening exercises and decidedly not running (this is, coincidentally, when I fell face-first into cycling). Even now, though, when I exercise, I am constantly in a state of monitoring the way that part of my body feels. Because it had hurt, because the hurt came so suddenly and again without a discernable root, because it took a long time to feel “normal” again—is it really back to the way it was? Whether it is or isn’t is no longer a simple judgment; the memory changes it.

So I am thinking about my back. So I am thinking about the way traumas of many kinds lodge in the body, and the body has its own way of remembering, even if we might like to forget.

What I’m making: For the reason above, I haven’t done a whole lot of making, but I did cobble together this meringue roulade, which I made as my own birthday dessert.

I very loosely followed this Mary Berry recipe for making the roulade itself. It’s filled with a blood orange and passionfruit curd, plus some whipped cream. Next time, I will try the meringue with slightly less sugar and might try a Swiss meringue so the sugar is entirely dissolved in the meringue. (Mine was a smidge grainy.) I do very much love a meringue, and I’m sad that I was nearly 30 before I’d even heard of a pavlova. (But I will do my best to make up for this.)

What I’m reading: I don’t usually read before bed because it is a well-noted truth that when I read before bed, I think “just a few pages” and then it’s 1:27 a.m. and I’m saying things to myself like, “Well, you might as well finish it now.”

But sometimes I need to replace the hamster wheel in my brain with the hamster wheel in someone else’s, so I turn to re-reads of old favorites, particularly fantasy novels I’ve read so often that I’m not really reading so much as I am reminding myself of where things happen on the page. Right now, while the vast majority of my reading is student work and I’m constantly drinking from the fire-hose of ambient anxiety, I’ve returned to Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. It’s historical fantasy, though relatively light on the fantastical elements; the real joy of it is the premise: lifelong thief and confidence man Locke Lamora gets himself into truly horrifying trouble and then has to get out of it. This means that all three of the novels are layers and layers of elaborate schemes and heists, audacious gambles, and a palpable feeling of delight in the invention of new characters and settings, which are designed to throw up sparks when Locke is scraped against them. The second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies, is my favorite. The series has its shortcomings, but it is phenomenal at raising the stakes.

What I’m writing: “Searching for Answers in the Enormous” is my latest for the Ploughshares blog, focused on Jeannie Marshall’s All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. My recurring feeling as I was reading? A bit like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but for art history, which is essentially the highest praise I can offer. I’ll also be presenting on this illuminating book at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mt. Gretna in June.