A couple weeks after I published the last piece I wrote on this site, a story all about being confident in my independence and feeling proud that I don’t have to rely on a man, I found a tiny mouse in my apartment and immediately wanted to rescind everything I had written.
It wasn’t so much the “finding of the mouse” that sparked my newfound deep need for dependence. In fact, I think I handled the initial first spotting very well, especially considering the last time I saw a mouse in my place of residence, I was living with a roommate in the worst apartment in all of Manhattan and, instead of claiming any form of responsibility, text her “There is a mouse dying in the middle of our living room, but I am late to brunch, can you handle?” (She did and I still feel bad about my horrific behavior years and years later). This time around, I immediately called my (on-site) super who, in turn, asked me to immediately call the (off-site) landlord because he was “too busy boiling potatoes” which is the funniest response I have ever or will ever receive in a moment of crisis. My landlord drove over and, after setting up a trap, asked me if I thought I’d be able to handle cleaning up the mess once it went off. Hot on my bad bitch kick — and assuming he’d set up the kind of trap that has a small box to cover the body — I assured him that I was a strong, independent woman and would be fine.
A few hours later, I learned I was not a strong, independent woman when the trap went off and I found my landlord had actually opted into using the good, old-fashioned original snap trap. Expecting to find a small cardboard box with a dead mouse concealed inside, I instead walked into my kitchen to find that the mouse had been so tiny, the trap decapitated it and had flown it’s mini head across the room, spreading more blood than I could ever have imagined across my tile floors.
Immediately, I Facetimed ZG sobbing.
Zach and I have been friends since our sophomore year of college when he chaotically careened into my life by taking the empty seat next to me in the Art and Journalism Building cafeteria. That seat had originally been meant for the guy I was seeing at the time, but he had stood me up and, as Zach (likely unwillingly) sat listening to me complain about this, it cemented his role in my life as someone I turn to in times of crisis.
This has only increased in the past 10+ years. ZG and I moved to New York within months of each other and, as our other friends seem to be leaving the city with an almost alarming frequency, Zach and I are still here. Though I’m now in Brooklyn, putting us at an hour and a half commute from each other — a commute that requires transferring to at least three different train lines, a thing I would do for no one but him — and, sometimes when we FaceTime from our respective apartments, it will be raining by him and sunny by me, his presence in this city is the most constant thing in my adult life.
Despite that consistency, the experiences Zach and I used to have when we first moved to New York are vastly different than what our lives look like now. When I used to write about things that had happened to us, the content was…. wild. We were frequently drunk visiting a psychic named Brandi at 4 a.m. and giving her all the money we owned (which, for the record, was not a lot)! We were dating people who kept lit candles as air fresheners in their car’s cupholder! The setting was usually Barfly! I read stories I wrote years ago and struggle now to recognize the people we used to be, especially myself. In part, I think this is something that happens to everyone as they get older, but as someone who stopped drinking in 2020, I feel like the difference for me is even more stark. Though I know that being a sober person is definitely the correct move for me, I do worry sometimes that I am not as “fun” as I used to be.
Though my friends constantly reassure me that this is not true and I am still fun (“I couldn’t even tell you weren’t blackout drunk!,” my friend Emily told me after my first attendance sober at a bottomless brunch, a compliment that sparked a minor existential crisis about my personality in general), I know I am definitely a different person than I was three years ago. I think I am a better, kinder person than I was back then, but even with that positivity, there’s this small feeling of loss in that I gave up the crazy stories, the late nights, the “this-would-only-happen-to-you” experiences. I expected to feel this way when I got sober — to be honest, I think knowing that it would happen is one of the reasons I didn’t stop drinking earlier — and while I was initially embarrassed by it, it’s now something I’ve gotten more comfortable speaking about.
I spend good money every week to talk in length about this with my therapist, but the very first person I brought it up to was a guy I was seeing last year. The conversation arose on a night when I was laying in his bed, listening to him tell me that he recently watched a TikTok pointing out some red flags men have and he was pretty sure he had some. Our relationship was casual to the point of a fault, so I did not hesitate to assure him that, actually, he had several and the ones he had checked off from the video (purple lights in his room! a pineapple tattoo!) would not have even cracked my Top 10 for him.
Realizing slightly too late that this was a kind of mean thing to say to someone who is having you sleepover, I tried to cover it up by asking what he thought my red flags were. He told me that I sometimes seemed too sad and, also, that I was too old to be eating tortilla chips and pints of ice cream for dinner multiple nights a week, even if it was an incredible endorsement of how hard I worked out at 305. (I agreed with him, though I distinctly remember thinking that my actual red flag was that I knew immediately I would someday write about this conversation for the Internet). I told him — likely ineloquently, for it was the first time I’d tried to put it into words — that the sadness probably bled from the loss of self, even if that self hadn’t been someone I’d particularly liked. We didn’t stay together long after that night, but the talk stuck with me and, in my introduction to my therapist, it was the first thing I mentioned.
I would literally never credit this guy for being the reason I now go to therapy because that would be a massive overstatement of our extremely casual relationship. (For what it’s worth, we saw each other like a month ago and he wanted to clarify the girl he decided to try things out with again did NOT throw spaghetti on his bed, like I had written in my previous blog post, but at him. I said I would issue this correction, though, personally, I really think both acts give off the same exact energy). But, anyway — when the person you are being the most physically vulnerable with tells you that your emotional health doesn’t seem fully solid, it does give you room to think on how you can grow. Talking to someone once a week seemed to be the most proactive way to do so, especially since, before I found my therapist, I was handling my mental health by taking multiple 305 classes in a row to shut my brain off and — while it was working! — my knees were starting to feel 50 years older than the rest of my body.
And, so, now, every Monday, I stream-of-conscious talk for 60 full minutes to a lovely woman who I do believe is significantly younger than I am and whom, despite my best efforts, I have only managed to shock exactly once. In the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about how I’d love to find a hobby — I enjoy my job, but I have no desire to make it my full personality in the same way that I did when I was 22, and while 305 has provided me a physical outlet to explore my self, I’ve been looking for something to fulfill the spaces “being an art director” and “drinking alcohol” used to take. It was my homework to come back with some ideas and, while I do believe she thought I was going to come back to the next session saying “knitting!” or “pottery!” or “puzzles!,” I joined last week’s call saying “I’m going to join Equinox!”
Back when I lived in the worst apartment in Manhattan, I was a member at Equinox and, while I absolutely could not afford it even in the slightest at the time, it was the most luxurious I’d ever felt. I mean, the eucalyptus towels! the sauna! the extremely hot people! Kanye had even written a song about it and it was early 2016, so that was still cool! I lived in that horrific apartment with the dying mice in our living room for a year-and-a-half, yet only showered there twice because I spent so much at time at the fancy gym. When I was doing my therapy homework and trying to think about something that brought me pure, uncomplicated joy, my bougie time at Equinox was what I kept returning to.
My therapist was initially confused by my intentions to join a gym as my additional hobby, seeing as the only other hobby I had currently told her I had was 305 and, again, my knees were breaking. But, I explained to her, the space for me was more than somewhere I could push my body physically — it’s where I was able to relax in the steam room, to practice mindfulness in the sauna, to stretch in a safe space and, of course, to indulge in self-care with the free Kiehl’s products. At the very least, if I hadn’t convinced her after 60 minutes of talking about it, I’d convinced myself, and a few hours after that session, I signed a contract committing me to spend an ungodly amount of money at the gym.
Two days later, I got an unshakeable 102 degree fever.
I have been fairly blessed to have pretty minor medical emergencies in my life — other than my ovarian cyst exploding in 2016 and my artery bursting in my mouth after my wisdom tooth surgery in 2021, the sickest I have ever been was when I was two and licked a shopping cart and got the worst case of mono the doctor had ever seen. So, when my fever reached 102 and was creeping steadily up to 103, I didn’t think I was sick… I chalked it up to spending too much time self-caring in the sauna. By the weekend, though, when I woke up feeling infinitely worse than I ever have, I slowly walked to City MD with the facial expression of the salute emoji, assuming that, after 3+ years of dodging it, Covid had finally come for me.
After ruling out the Big Three (flu, strep, Covid), the doctor sent me to a second location to go get chest x-rays, the results of which I haven’t actually seen because they handed me them on a CD-rom and it is 2023. But, apparently, someone’s laptop at that office still has a disk drive because on my way home, I got the call I had a spot on my right lung and they were certain — despite my age and despite it being mid-April — that I had pneumonia.
Immediately, I wanted to Facetime ZG sobbing, but we have a pretty strict cap in our friendship on the number of times per year I’m allowed to cold-call him crying and I’d already gone over quota with the decapitated mouse. Plus, as my emergency contact, he was the only person in my life I’d already texted that morning to tell I was on my way to the doctor, knowing that if I did have to be admitted into the emergency room, he’d need ample time to prepare for the weekend-schedule subway journey between the Upper East Side and Bed-Stuy.
Also, at this point, I was sick enough that I could barely breathe through spending the energy of sending the “lmao I have pneumonia” text. The thought of not only speaking on a phone, but allowing anyone other than myself to actually see the gross things coming up out of my lungs was so horrifying, it put me right back on the independence kick that the headless mouse had knocked to the side. This isn’t to say I didn’t have a support system. In fact, far from it. I was trying to be cool about it, but I was ill enough that I did not think I was going to survive the weekend and every person who I let know I was sick — from my friend who happened to ask “hey, are you busy? want to go grab a coffee?!” at the exact moment I was getting a chest x-ray to my cousin a few towns over who text me every four hours on the hour to make sure I was still alive — offered genuine kindness and assistance which will forever be appreciated. Even my super, who could hear me hacking away from outside, called up to my second-floor window to make sure I was alright. (The most I could manage was a double thumbs up which, ironically, was the same nervous gesture I made when he came into my apartment and picked up the two pieces of the dead mouse off my kitchen floor with his bare hands).
Because one of my first core memories in life is being bedridden for literal weeks with mono, I have spent the past 29 years dealing with any illness the same way I did when I was two: I eat nothing save for Goldfish and Dole ice pops and I watch “The Great Mouse Detective” on repeat. I am not exaggerating when I say these are the only activities I did for 72 straight hours. On the 73rd hour, when the amoxicillin fully kicked in and I started to be able to breathe without feeling like I was being stabbed slowly (but accurately!) through the chest, I realized it would have been beneficial for me to have chosen a hobby I did not have to travel to a second location in order to participate in. The shock of finally feeling better was exhilarating and I was eager to spend the rest of my time in quarantine doing something that would not further damage my already-damaged lungs.
Which, I suppose, is how this blog post came to be.
I would never say I am thankful for this happening to me — I am not. I cried a lot and, at one point, thought I was going to maybe die and, also, my hypochondria is so alert after working at a job where we publish articles like “This 28-year-old thought she had a headache, but it really was a rare cancer” that I FaceTimed the 24/7 doctor with a compression sock on my wrist like a puppet convinced I had blood clots when it actually turns out I just slept on it wrong, which was very embarrassing! That being said, this past week has been eye-opening for me. Pneumonia is the least fun experience I have ever had (0/10, would not recommend), but it did change my outlook on a lot of things in my life. It caused me to become so grateful for all the physical activity I’d been unknowingly taking for granted. I pride myself on my independence, but seeing that I had people I could depend upon if I needed them made me feel safe and loved. And, while I do wish I had discovered my hobby is writing before I dropped a thick check at Equinox, being able to create something like this out of words again finally filled that void I had been so endlessly searching to solve.