Very often, I feel like I need to be more judicious about what I write here — like I can't share any words until they are a series of fully formed thoughts leading to a compelling argument, and those fully formed thoughts and compelling arguments absolutely must lead to a thoughtful takeaway, and it is absolutely essential that those thoughts and arguments and takeaways somehow relate to the experience of being fat — the newsletter is called fat hell, after all.
I think that, actually, I need to be less judicious. My goal is always to write — and here it’s not for my job, but for myself and my desire to share my thoughts and experiences with the world, and maybe even articulate a few thoughts and experiences that other people have had but don’t know how to put into words. Maybe it doesn’t always follow the original concept — but then again, I’m a fat 38-year-old woman so maybe anything I write, no matter the topic, belongs in fat hell, because fat hell is just where I live; the cause of and solution to all of my problems.
I’m going to tell a story about a day in my recent past, one that has absolutely nothing to do with anything and has no argument or takeaway, at least not in the obvious sense. The story begins when I found a tin of CBD gummies in a drawer around 3:30 p.m. on a work day. I’ve been flying and driving a lot lately, and that combined with my desk job has left my back and hips feeling absolutely, for lack of a better word, fucked. I stretch twice daily, stay hydrated, and generally try to stand and walk once an hour, but the CBD offers a full body relaxation in a way that regular maintenance simply cannot. I’d forgotten I had them, so finding them in that drawer was a real thrill, so much so that I barely registered the unmarked tin they live in. Normally I’m conservative with my CBD dosage: I take half a gummy, or roughly 45 mg. This time, I decided to throw caution to the wind and take the full gummy, hoping that it would turn my evening at home into a total relaxation experience, as if I were wrapped in fine linens and lying in a zero-gravity bed in Himalayan salt room instead of surrounded by laundry and dog fur in a crumbling parlor floor apartment in Brooklyn.
I started to realize something had gone sideways while I was on a video call. The meeting had about 15 people in it, and someone I don’t know said something very routine, and I started laughing. Not just a little chuckle, either. I cackled, rushed to turn my camera off (thankfully the mic was off already), and continued to cackle about absolutely nothing at all. The meeting ended, as did the work day, and as the sun set into total darkness at 4:30 pm (LOL) and the vast expanse of the evening befell me, so did a realization: Instead of taking a CBD gummy, I had taken a mushroom gummy. And, instead of cutting it into fourths (the normal bit for a microdose, which I use to treat my depression), I ate the whole goddamn thing.
My first order of business was to send a voice note to my family group chat, which I have literally never done before.
“Hello everyone,” I whispered into the phone. “This is Amanda. I just want to let everyone know that I took a mushroom gummy during the work day by accident. Don’t worry about me, but I just felt it was essential for you all to know.”
No one replied except for my dad, who sent this:
I also alerted my sister privately.
“You gotta call me,” I said in a voice note to my sister with the urgency of Liam Neeson searching for his recently trafficked fictional daughter. “Like I said in the group chat, I ate a huge mushroom gummy. I need help.”
“Take a shower, go to bed,” she replied, exhausted from a long day of saving lives in a Chicago hospital. “Calming music. Limit stimuli. My day was so fucking long. Enjoy the journey.”
I knew then she would not be my shepherd, so I decided to try and follow her advice and attempt to enjoy my journey. I dimmed the lights and laid flat onto my bed, which was extremely warm due to a heating pad I’d tucked under the covers for the dogs. I’m the type of person who will argue publicly that “little dogs aren’t all like the stereotype you think of, not all of them tremble and bark at nothing.” In reality, two of my dogs are 10 pounds each, bark at the ever-so-slightest disturbance, and break into violent full body spasms when the temperature drops below 50 degrees. They are who they are — and in that moment, with that gigantic mushroom gummy inside of me, I was right there with them, sinking into the hot pad to reduce the vibrations pulsing through my body trying to tell my brain to stop my mouth from barking.
And like I assume many high people before me have done, I put on “Landslide,” the perennial “enjoy the journey” Stevie Nicks song about searching for meaning in a world that keeps changing. Always one to fully lean into a moment, I stared at the ceiling and began to softly weep.
“Mirror in the sky,” I said aloud to my contractor grade boob light, “What is love?”
At some point during this episode I crossed a threshold, one I almost always cross when I’m high. I’ve never been a person who can tolerate drugs very well. As a youth, I told myself I loved getting stoned, and you’d think that taking few hits off someone’s bowl in the back of a car cruising through the cornfields of central Ohio would be a relaxing endeavor. Instead, I’d usually go all quiet and strange and convince myself I no longer had a tongue. I wanted to love getting stoned more than I actually loved it, and while my reaction to pot and mushrooms has changed for the better as I’ve dealt with my underlying anxiety, the relationship is still imperfect and unpredictable. Sometimes, if I’m in a particularly stable chapter of life, or feel really fulfilled professionally and creatively, I can smoke pot or eat a mushroom gummy and feel the way you’re supposed to feel, super light and giggly and free. However, more often than not, I spend about three minutes light and giggly and free, and then sink into an existential panic about my future, imagining myself languishing in a nursing home, 401K drained, no loved ones to speak of, no legacy left behind. I also get really in my head about my professional life, despite the fact that I know I am an extremely competent person who gets almost exclusively positive feedback from my peers. When I’m stoned, I convince myself that, actually, I’m a dead weight, just moments away from being fired, a washed up dilettante without a network, the type of person for whom there is a very clear “end of the road” professionally, and that ending is just one or two steps away.
Typically, I narrate this spiral to my girlfriend Rach, a person who is much younger than me but with far more patience.
“I found a container of CBD gummies in my drawer,” I explained over text. “Come to find out they’re mushroom gummies.”
She did as promised, and when she called I did what I always do: Listed my insecurities while working myself into an absolute lather.
“Do I have a normal job, a normal life for a 38 year old? Do I have enough money — no, I definitely don’t, but is that ok? Am I a failure? Other people seem to know how to go about their day to day lives and be successful, and I’m not,... Am I? I don’t feel like I am. How are we ever going to live together? How will we move? That seems like a lot of work. Who will pay? Will I have a robust 401K? Who will take care of me when I’m old? How will anything that is supposed to happen ever actually happen? Am I physically capable of making huge changes? Am I capable of anything, ever, that isn’t just sitting in this apartment on this very hot bed with these weird little dogs listening to Landslide???”
As always, Rach listened and reassured, though at this point in our relationship she’s seen so many of these spirals she knows that when they happen, it’s almost not worth it to try and talk me out of them. Still, she always tries her best, though I know the harshly self-deprecating talk and narration of my doubts is painful and difficult for her to listen to. How could it not be? From her perspective, and many others’ as well, I have basically nothing to spiral about. I’ve worked my ass off to move to different goal posts in my career, have a variety of skills, am loved by friends and family, try to live my life with integrity, and have a talent with which I can express myself whenever I am so moved. It’s not that she’s diminishing my experience — as a therapist in training, she’s very aware of the fact that a person’s anxieties often come from a place miles away from the truth.
So what is that place, exactly? I think about this a lot, and I believe it’s a combination of traumatic experiences, hard-earned but under-supplied self esteem, and a lifelong bout of low grade depression. I also think that at a certain point, I have to figure out how to get the fuck over myself. All of those things, for me, co-exist, and the work I’m trying to do now is figuring out how to let them.
The truth is, for a very long time, I couldn’t see anything but disaster for myself in the future — I didn’t feel like I deserved anything different. For most of my years, I’ve felt like life was a series of problems to solve: places to run from and towards, relationships to explore and destroy, anger to release, a body to try and change, or try and accept, or both, or neither.
The mere idea of changing these anxiety cycles and fear forecasts is terrifying to me, sometimes, too. The thought of losing what I’ve come to know as my primary motivator — AKA, being so stressed out and panicked that you simply either act on impulse or shut down completely — feels like losing a part of myself, a way of being that’s the only one I’ve ever known. The thought of not changing it, though, that’s even scarier.
I was reading the lyrics of “Landslide” on my phone (LOL) when Rach switched the call from audio to FaceTime. She was puttering in her kitchen, calmly listening to me high-spiral without the benefit of the sober insights above. She looked gentle and soft in the light of her studio kitchenette in Philadelphia where she attends grad school, and she was making mac and cheese. I was too committed to my own panic to admit that her reassurances were starting to make sense, that maybe the mushrooms were wearing off, that maybe there was hope for my own personal slice of the future and that I wasn’t destined to suddenly transform into the worst version of myself at any moment, thus living the rest of my life as the chaotic, half-formed mess I always assumed I had to be. Of course, once I became slightly more self aware about the conversational journey I’d taken us on, another burning question jumped to the front of the line.
“Why do you even like me?” I asked her, thinking about how obnoxious and frustrating it must be to be with someone who is both mentally ill and extremely verbose and also has bad enough ADHD to accidentally ingest psychedelic drugs on a weeknight.
“I don’t like you,” she replied with a grin. “But I do love you.”
I don’t know if it was the mushrooms or the moment or melancholy bleating of Stevie Nicks lingering in the air, but suddenly I felt better. It was time, maybe, to enjoy the journey.
Don't have anything super articulate to say other than thank you for this post! I can relate for sure.
Love your writing ! I only recently subscribed to fat hell but when I see you’ve written something I read it straight away
I related to your story too. In fact, I dreamt last night I was at a party in the countryside, with yummy things being cooked over warm glowing coals, getting high, really enjoying myself for about 5 minutes then falling into a spiral of anxiety that I was a bad dog owner because I lost my little dog in the crowd and he didn’t know anyone...