Media Diet: An all feelings, no answers kinda March

"Creep," Gaga, a cancer sex quest, and hetero studies

Welp, it’s been a month. And by that I mean it’s been a month since I’ve written (actually, more), but also I mean *said with wide eyes and a head nod and an exhausted tone* it’s been A MONTH.

Venus Retrograde has been Venus Retrograding, which, for the non-astrologically inclined, means lots of conflicts, changes, renegotiations, and revelations regarding relationships, and the way that’s shown up for me in the last month has been both awesome (my sister and I are closer than ever; I suddenly was able to just let go, with calm and ease, of a situation that has brought me angst and anxiety for a full year) and awful (I’ve had realizations about some close connections that have brought me to my knees). All of it feels in service of growth and ultimate good, but it’s all just… a lot. Especially the parts where there are things I know or see now - about who people are, about what I want or need and where I can/can’t get it - but I don’t know what to do with that information yet. As my sister said, while I sobbed to her over FaceTime the other day about All The Things, the vibe right now is “all feelings, no answers.”

Speaking of my sister, March has also been the Month of Sister. Sally lives in Bozeman, Montana, and thanks to her ME/CFS (Yes, we both have it! Lucky us!) and her degenerative muscle disease and the lingering complications of her former cancer (Yes, she has all of that too! Lucky her!), she’s only been able to visit twice in the past five years - and I haven’t been able to visit her even once. So a visit is a big deal to both of us.

This second visit, which kicked off March 11, was even better than the first. After a five-day quarantine (halved from last year, as a compromise made both for family convenience and because of better at-home PCR testing technology), we managed to spend some truly joyful, connected, healing, beautiful, silly, fun days together. And thanks to work we’ve both done on our mental and physical health, we both had more capacity to be present - emotionally but also just logistically and physically, in each other’s company. The laughing, the tears, singing along to Alanis Morissette and Weezer, watching Wicked, meditating while holding hands, eating turkey and swiss on sourdough while talking about boys from high school. Me, impressed, as Sally sings every word of “No Diggity,” while we eat gluten-free chocolate cake and dairy-free vanilla ice cream standing up at the counter. Sally, choking laughing at the sink, because I told her I used do solo crying interpretive dance while listening to Tool…

And then culminating on my 47th birthday, with a sweet indoor masked visit with my mom, half the time with my feet in Mom’s lap, the other half with my sister’s feet in mine.

All so deeply… satisfying. Nourishing. Life-affirming. And just really fucking fun.

And also all consuming. I usually can’t accomplish anything else on a day when I have a visitor, and for a few days after, and so this was several weeks of All Sister (and then rest) All the Time. Which is exactly how I wanted it, but it does have a certain vacation/vortex/time-out-of-time feeling to it. And other pursuits - like, say, writing this Substack - do get put on hold.

And then came The Fall.

Not as in autumn.

As in, what goes up must come down.

As in, the crash.

You’d think I’d know by now that there’s no such thing as a free ride when it comes to ME/CFS, but I’ve been doing so well lately, and it felt so good being with my sister, and we took rest breaks together, and I didn’t crash during or after our visits like I normally would, and so I let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t pay for all that socializing. Even though it was far and away more hours in a row, for more days in a row, than I’ve spent socializing - or even just in the same building as another human - in years.

And to be honest, I probably didn’t pay for it as long or as hard as I might’ve a year ago, or if we hadn’t done such a good job of taking care of ourselves and each other.

But still. The bill came due. And I have spent the past eight days in abject misery, of the sort I’d almost forgotten about.

It’s not the physical symptoms themselves that are so bad, though the muscle pain and headaches and constipation and bladder irritation and insomnia and racing heart and dizziness and seasick feeling and brainfog and lack of executive function and crushing fatigue definitely suck.

Nor is it all the things I can’t do, though not being able to write or think or make decisions or open mail or change my sheets or respond to messages or listen to fun music or watch a whole TV show also sucks.

What really gets me is what they call the “sense of well-being,” or rather, the lack of it. It’s the anxiety. The emotional lability. Lack of resilience. Being on the verge of tears at any moment and not knowing if it’s because of something real (like missing my sister, who just left her AirBnB a block away, from which she could visit every day, to check in to a place at the beach two towns over, which is just far enough that neither she nor I are likely to be able to drive to the other more than once, if at all) or if it’s just a hook my brain is hanging its inflammation upon.

The fear that this means I haven’t made that much progress after all. That I can’t trust my body or my instincts, because my body and my instincts said what I was doing was okay. The fear that maybe I can’t improve at all, actually, and that maybe this crash will never lift. The loss of the ability to feel peace and joy. The loss of hope.

There are these subtle things that happen when I have a sense of well-being. I sing along or bob my head to music. I smile when I think of something happy, or when someone makes a joke in a text. I look at something I love - the gold-leaf moon on the side of my ceramic bowl, or the bright pink bougainvillea leaves on my porch - and I feel appreciation, peace, a feeling that things are right with the world. I go “yummmmmm” when I take an especially good bite of white rice with sesame oil and soy sauce and sesame seeds. I wiggle in my seat when the first square of mint dark chocolate hits my tongue.

But when I crash, all of that disappears. My senses dull. My ability to feel gratitude disappears. It’s as though good feelings are at the top of a carnival thermometer, and when I’m in a crash, my body can’t hit the hammer hard enough to reach much past “blah” or “vague general annoyance.”

It’s the loss of that that really gets me in those moments. And that makes me understand why the suicide rate for people with ME/CFS is so high. (Though luckily I have a lot of support in that area, and it’s been years now since I’ve had real suicidal ideation - knock on IKEA particle board nightstand wood.)

Now, yes, it’s true, I have all these new tools now, and I did use them, and they did help. I made it through this hard week with less agony than the last time I crashed this hard for this long, without a doubt. But it was hard to appreciate that fact in the moment. It is only now, on the first day since my sister left that I feel like my (normal baseline fatigued and headachy but able to punch my fist in the air to the chorus of “Kiss from a Rose”) self again, that I’m able to see it.

And so here I am, re-emerging, out of the fog, and onto the internet, feeling like I’ve just been through something. And I have a feeling I’m not the only one. It feels like we’ve all been going through a time, and I’m not even talking about the daily political insanity that inspired those amazing protests yesterday (though I’m also talking about those).

I don’t think we’re through the worst of it yet. I know that, at least for me, I expect the next months to bring more revelations, more changes, more challenges. I had a Solar Return reading (think astrological chart reading, except instead of reading the constellations on the day you were born, it’s reading the constellations on the day of your current birthday, as a prediction of what’s to come in the next year), and the theme seems to be lots of growth towards what serves me, but at the cost of lots of discomfort and possible loss. And that feels… about right. I can feel it coming. It’s already happening. I don’t know what I’m going to lose. I don’t know what the discomfort will be (though I can guess it’ll likely be some grief, some loneliness, more crashes, maybe an identity crisis or two). I don’t know if it will happen like catharsis (which, as an Aries, I honestly kind of hope for, because oooh pretty fire!), or more like a slow unfolding (which, annoyingly, is probably what I’ll get instead).

All I know is that I’m here for it. I want the growth. I want the change. I’m ready for things to keep being more and more different than they were before. For me to be more and more different than I was before. And if discomfort is the toll I must pay to cross that bridge (and it always is), I’ll pay it. Which I think at least sets me up better than many to weather the coming storms. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that when I’m sobbing and hopeless again in May (or maybe, do - it’ll probably help).

Til then, all feelings, no answers. And I’ll just have to sit in that.

And find hope and joy and diversion where I can.

Which brings us to this installment of Media Diet.

There isn’t a ton this month, as, I’ve noted above, I’ve been busy (though if I could recommend trading phones with your sister to check out what each other’s exes look like now, I would), but here’s some of what’s been bringing me joy and/or tickling my brain lately. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.

And if there’s something doing it for you, please do share in the comments. I feel like we can all use what we can get.

“Creep” by Sam Tinnesz, Club Danger (song)

An old friend/boyfriend who’s basically family now (but with whom I’ve had a habit of making out at weddings a couple of times a decade) recently got back in touch (which is also a Venus Rx vibe) and, amidst our (platonic, this time) exchange, he shared that he has been listening to this song on repeat for two weeks. I can see why.

The original is so good that it’s hard for any cover to be bad, but this cover is good. My instinct is that it’s using contemporary musical techniques and aural landscapes to create the same emotional impact the original song had, but in a language that makes it land just as hard now, anew.

Like, when I listen to this I feel something. It huuuuurts. In my soul. In such a good way. The ‘90s version hurt too, though that was more of an angry angst. This vibe is more of a Euphoria-style driving darkness. A falling to your knees on a dark wet street, screaming into the night, at, or for, or adjacent to, a very troubled Zendaya. (In fact, I thought it must have been on that soundtrack, but apparently not…?) What an absolute treat to just be torn in two by the gorgeous arrangement of a song you’d already thought had torn you apart as many times as it could.

Lady Gaga, and Mayhem, and “Abracadabra” (superstar, album, song)

Like everyone else on Earth, I’m having a Lady Gaga moment. “Abracadabra” has pretty much been on repeat since I saw the video’s debut while watching the Grammy’s, which is exactly what her marketing team hoped would happen and, well, I don’t even care. You’re welcome, marketing team.

I’m actually not a huge Lady Gaga stan in general. Like, I like her fine. I appreciate her - her artistic sensibility, her contribution to the pop culture conversation, her place in LGBTQIA culture and history, her fashion, her whole vibe - more than I actually like most of her music (in no small part, I’m sure, because I’m not a huge dance music person).

I do like (and am a little mystified) that we have the same Big Three (Aries sun, Scorpio moon, Gemini rising). I’m proud that I walked with the American Embassy’s “Born This Way” banner alongside the delegation that brought her to perform live at Euro Pride in Rome in 2011. I love to brag that I got to wash and fold 100 new, white hand towels to fulfill the rider for her 2014 SXSW performance, because I was part of the team that produced that show. And I will never forget absolutely collapsing in sobs when seeing her perform “Swine” that same year alongside the vomiting performance artist Millie Brown - still the most visceral and accurate depiction of the experience of sexual trauma and its internal aftermath I’ve ever seen in my life.

But that’s where it usually stops for me. I almost never put on a Gaga album. I honestly find some of her hits - “Applause,” “Paparazzi,” “Bad Romance” - kind of boring. I loved A Star is Born and “Shallow” is a great song, but I never think to go back and watch/listen to either one. Mostly, I just consume art from other people while I am passively glad she exists.

But something about this new album is speaking to me. Maybe it’s her grunge goth Juliet aesthetic (or the mesmerizing choreo) in the "Abracadabra” video. Maybe it’s the disability and mental illness themes in “Abracadabra” and “Disease.” Maybe it’s all the musical styles she’s referencing on Mayhem. Maybe it’s how fun it was to teach myself the cadence of “AB-ra-CA-da-BRA AB-ra-CA-DAAAAA-BRA” (now that’s a hook), or how fun it was to watch my sister lip sync to it while bobbing her head like a duck (and our dead dad) as I put my lunch in the microwave. Whatever it is, I’m into it.

Here’s some of my favorite media related to the new album:

This YouTube video is an excellent (and fun) breakdown of the imagery and symbolism in “Abracadabra,” including some of the choices - like use of canes, seated dancing, Gaga being carried - that are making the disabled community squeal (in a good way).

Gaga is often guarded and kind of awkward in interviews, and anywhere she’s not actively performing music or film (like that cringe-tastic SNL episode), but she shows a more relaxed, comfortable side of herself with Bowen and Matt on Las Culturistas - maybe because they’re more her kind of people and her community. It’s fun to hear her open up, and hear them fawn over her, and hear all three of them connect on a deep level. (Also if you’re not already listening to this delightful podcast by Bowen Yang, of SNL fame, and Matt Rogers, of Have You Heard of Christmas? fame.

The always fantastic podcast Switched on Pop tours through the musical influences of Mayhem through a music theory/history lens, catching references I did too (Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, disco), and references I missed (Prince, Chappell Roan).

In the New York Times article “The Interview: Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness,” Gaga talks about the process of making the album, and what it’s like to make art now vs. when she started. Some of this is territory covered in the podcast, but the photos are purrrty.

Dying for Sex (TV show, FX/Hulu)

I promised my sister I would stop recommending things before I’d fully finished them, but I lied. I’m only 2/3 of the way through the first episode of Dying for Sex and I’m already gonna tell you to watch it. If you listen to any podcasts at all, you’ve already heard the ubiquitous ads explaining the premise: Molly (played by the luminous Michelle Williams) is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and decides she doesn’t want to die without having the best sex of her life, so she leaves her husband (played by the perfectly long-suffering Jay Duplass) to go on a sex quest, with the help of her best friend Nikki (the hilarious and somehow still underrated even though she’s very highly rated Jenny Slate). I haven’t even gotten to the full sex quest part, and already I’m hooked on this show. It’s funny, unexpected, and raw. The chemistry between Michelle and Jenny is off the charts. The tone is somewhat light-hearted in an honest, sardonic “cancer and dying is weird” way, not in a “cancer is just a plot device for this hilaaaaarious comedy” way. And it’s just… good writing. 5 Stars. Unless, you know, it gets boring in the last third of this episode. Then forget everything I said. Also, I’m sure my sister will forgive me, since I’m the one that came up with that oath in the first place. Maybe my next promise should be that I stop making oaths no one asked me to make.

”If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnership as the real deviance” (Article, The Cut)

I don’t know if it’s this article exactly that’s making me so happy or the existence of the UCSB course the article is about, but either way, I’m tickled pink (and blue and purple and every other color of every queer flag) that there is a professor teaching a Hetero Studies class because god knows straight relationships need studying - not only because there is so much there to explore, unpack, and question, but because the very act of studying them the way we do queer relationships undermines the long-held assumption that they are the default, they are “normal,” and therefore there is nothing to look at. If we put hetero relationships under the same microscope we do queer ones, we are one step closer to admitting that all relationships are just relationships, which are all choices, and all cultures with their own dynamics and rituals and power plays. And once we do that, perhaps we can all make our choices more intentionally, and also see each other’s choices and cultures as valid and valuable and worthy of protecting.