Body Problems and How to Escape Them
Xenocide, Jade City, Vicious, Ready Player One, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Pantheon *[eczema, ableism, mind-uploading, the multiverse]*
This is a very personal post. If you just want to read about mind-uploading and the multiverse, skip to the end. TW for non-abstract discussion of slightly taboo/gross bodily phenomena and depictions of self-harm and attempted suicide in media.
I often get very frustrated with my body. I hate that it distracts me, that I have to spend precious time thinking about it, that I can’t entirely control it. It feels as if I am subject to a never-ending, demoralizing, productivity-debuffing, painful psychic curse. It feels as if no one else has to think about their body ever1, whereas I am constantly at war with myself, depleting energy on the side just to deal with stupid, uncontrollable, body problems.
Sometimes I wish I was a formless blob.
To be clear, I do not have issues with my appearance (any more than most people) or issues with physical strength or dexterity (I don’t work out much but I eat well). I have constitution issues: severe eczema, eye problems (not the kind glasses fix), stomach and immune system issues, and numerous allergies and sensitivities.
If I know you in real life, you’re probably thinking, “when I interact with David he doesn’t seem like he’s overly thinking about his body at all!” And maybe I’m not—I usually find that being with other people helps take me away from my bodily distractions. Because my body problems are primarily self-induced, uncontrollable, and attention-based, diverting my attention to things like work or social interaction helps a lot. It’s usually only when I’m left to my own devices that the monsters under my skin reveal themselves. At least at school—elsewhere I deteriorate much faster.
I require a perfect sleeping environment: humid, open-air, cold, minimal dust and pollen. I am extremely fortunate to have a roommate who also prefers most of these conditions, and so at school we sleep with our window open, fan blowing even in the winter, humidifier running 24/7 on high. It is only because of this base environment that I am able to seem so composed, dear readers.
The moment I sleep out of this oasis for a few days, anywhere remotely dry or dusty, it all comes crashing down. I am immediately beset with Symptoms. My body cannot help but itch itself; my eyes cannot help but water, which prompts rubbing; my nose cannot help but send phlegm up into my brain, inducing a headache. What I hate most about this is that it is uncontrollable. Many people think of ‘body problems’ as “I don’t exercise enough” or “I eat too many doritos,” but these issues are at least controllable2. If I want to be stronger or in better shape, I need to exercise more and eat better. If I want my body to stop itching itself, I require this perfect environment, and if this perfect environment doesn’t exist, I’m kinda fucked.
I
My childhood favorite book (actually it may still be my favorite book?) was Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. What I identify most with in Xenocide is its depiction of OCD, a condition which I do not have3. It resonated so strongly with me as a child that I wrote a song on the piano about it when I was 11 years old or so. In Xenocide, an entire planet is ruled by those with OCD, or, as they portray it, those who are “hear the voices of the gods.” The most common way to tell if a child is “godspoken” [read: has OCD] is to check if their hands are bleeding—godspoken children will often rub their hands together obsessively to make sure they are clean. I really related to this urge.
II
One scene that’s always haunted me is from Jade City by Fonda Lee, the first book in my favorite fantasy trilogy:
One night when he was seven years old, Anden had found his mother sitting naked in the bathtub in the middle of the night. It had happened after a hot day in the middle of summer, he remembered that—one of those scorchers when people iced their bedsheets in the evening and hung wet towels in front of fans. He’d gotten up to pee. The light in the bathroom was on, and when he walked in, he saw her sitting there. Her hair was hanging in limp, wet strands over her face, and her shoulders and cheeks were shiny under the yellow glow. The only thing she was wearing was the three-layered jade choker she never took off. The bath was half full, the water pink with blood. Anden’s ma looked up at him, her expression blank and confused, and he saw that she held a cheese grater in her hand. The skin of her forearms was shredded, the flesh exposed like ground beef.
After a moment that felt as if it would never end, she offered him a small, sheepish smile. “I couldn’t sleep; I was too itchy. Go back to bed, my little.”
People in Jade City who are suffering from jade [read: magic substance] withdrawal get what’s called ‘the Itches.’ Ever since I read that scene, I’ve thought of myself as having the Itches. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember4.
III
In Vicious by V.E. Schwab5, there’s a scene where one of the main characters, who has gained the superhuman ability to heal from any wound, tries to knife himself to death, asking God to let him die if this power was not meant for him:
“Would You take it back?” he asked the dark apartment. “If I were no longer of Your making, You would take this power back, wouldn’t You?” Tears glistened in his eyes. “Wouldn’t You?”
He cut deep, carving a line from elbow to wrist, wincing as blood welled and spilled instantly, dripping to the floor. “You’d let me die.” He switched hands and carved a matching line down his other arm, but before he’d reached his wrist, the wounds were closing, leaving only smooth skin, and a small pool of blood.
“Wouldn’t You?” He cut deeper, through to bone, over and over, until the floor was red. Until he’d given his life to God a hundred times, and a hundred times had it given back. Until the fear and the doubt had all been bled out of him. And then he set the knife aside with shaking hands.
Eli dipped his fingertips in the slick of red, crossed himself, and got back to his feet.
This scene has always stuck with me6. Haunted me. Itching until it bleeds, asking God if this was meant to be.
To be clear, I want to live as long as possible, and the attempted-suicide part of these scenes is not what I relate to. The itching is. The fear that if I didn’t focus on my body at all, if I was completely passive and let my primal urges overtake me, I would claw myself to pieces and bleed to death on the bathroom floor.
You know that trope where someone’s left hand is fighting their right hand, which is trying to strangle them7? I feel like that, all the fucking time. I sit on my hands; I wear gloves when I’m sleeping; I pin them under my pillow with my head; I flex my hands and crack my finger bones, fiddling with things not because I have ADHD but because if I don’t give them something to do they will turn into vampires, or The Wolverine, and pull out all of my eyelashes until I look like Darth Sidious. I sometimes literally grab one hand with the other.
All of this makes me really empathize with media about ableism, even though I’m not disabled. It’s just the constant thinking about your own body that you can never get out of. I hate it. Sometimes I get so frustrated with my body, and how no one else seems to understand what it feels like, that I break down and cry in the bathroom to myself, and the tears fall down my cheeks, wetting them, and my eyelashes stick together in their wetness, and I reach to untangle them, uncontrollably, and pull out a piece of my eyelash, and then another, because the first one hasn’t come out right, and then a third, and then my eyelid is itchy, so I rub it, and I rub it and rub it and now my eyes are red and puffy, and watery again, and the cycle begins anew.
Did you know that I can induce tears in under five seconds, and that I can stare unblinking at myself in the mirror for over two minutes? My eyes will fill up with water; there will be an entire world in there, a Tapetum Lucidum; this was in fact the inspiration for A Tear in God's Iris; this is how I heal my eyes.
The last two paragraphs give a poetic rendition of what it feels like, and perhaps exaggerated; this specific event does not happen too regularly. But it does happen sometimes, and minor versions of it, often.
And things are even better now in some ways than when I was growing up. Before I got allergy shots, I was so stuffed up that each night I sneezed and wheezed and had trouble falling asleep, and stuck great big globs of phlegm on the wall of my room next to my bed while unconscious—until near the end of middle school, my wall was literally decorated with a patchwork of snot. When I was little, the insides of my elbows were always red; now I itch less frequently, and am much better at controlling myself and getting myself to sleep. (The upside of having evil urges is that you get very good at self-control, and this is also probably why I’ve gotten so good at meditation over the years.)
Eczema is not the only problem I have, even though it is perhaps the flagship, the most common, and the easiest to describe. I experience similar feelings as described above when I am hit by bad dysentery, which is relatively uncommon these days, or when non-perpetual problems afflict me, such as conjunctivitis or Covid or the common cold. Even with my allergies, and more so with my ‘sensitivities’—I will be asked, but you can eat dairy or beans, right? And I will answer, Yes, I guess I can, but in my mind I will answer, Yes, but do you really want me crying on the toilet in 18 hours?
I cry out to the world, to God: why must I deal with this? How can I deal with this? Why can’t the world just leave me alone?
I hate painful things I can’t control. Sometimes, I wish I was a formless blob8.
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.”
But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Mind Uploading
But what if I could actually be a formless blob? Or, even better, what if I could cherrypick the good things about having a body, and experience those, without experiencing all the bad? What if I could have a ‘normal’ body, free of body problems? That is all I ask…
For most of my life I hated the idea of mind uploading. When I first watched Pantheon during the pandemic, and read the stories it was based on, I inwardly cringed. I thought, and basically still think, that there is something inherently beautiful about living in the physical world, with its physical limitations and imperfect sensations. The sheer limitlessness of the digital world as a home for future humans scares me, as does the potential for infinite replication and deletion. Even if we are currently living in a simulation—and the simulation argument has only seemed more and more plausible to me over time—a simulation with our current limitations seems better than one with limitations we would set upon ourselves.
Anyway, mind uploading scares me.
But there have been a few specific moments in the past two years or so when I realized that mind uploading would have many benefits; namely, in that I would not have to feel the awful things I feel in my body, in that I would never be distracted by my body, in that my body problems could disappear. This is a big draw, and I realized that it would probably be an even stronger draw for disabled people than for myself.
I just watched the Ready Player One movie. It was not great, more of an homage to the book than an adaptation (see my review here), but it had a pretty nice line in the following:
People come to the OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay for all the things they can be.
The superficial draw of virtual reality is escaping from limitations in action—the ability to fly, use magical objects, race spaceships, or even kill people unpunished on battle-worlds. The fundamental draw of virtual reality is escaping from limitations in identity9. This scares me. I fear it will turn into the dissolution of the self, the loss of identity entirely and therefore of individual consciousness. But the draw is very powerful, and whenever I find myself beaten down by the physical world, wishing my body problems away, I am enticed by this vision of formlessness.
I wanted to make sure to end this post talking about the counterexamples; the good things about the physical world. The oft-cited arguments against mind uploading: pleasure, sensation, consciousness, love, and the idea that no virtual simulation will ever be able to match the pixel density of our physical (and mental/emotional) experience. (Of course, if we are living in a simulation right now, then this argument is moot.) These are great things. Are they things that cannot be replicated virtually? I have no idea.
Is there an inherent good in living in the bottom-world, the un-simulated world, the ur-world? Does that world even exist—if you’re religious, wouldn’t the bottom-world be simulated by God(s)? Even if we’re sure that the bottom-world exists, what is better about it than the upper worlds, the simulated ones? This goes back to Inception and The Matrix—is there an inherent truth to the bottom-world? An inherent goodness?10
These questions are too philosophical for me to answer right now. All I know is that despite my philosophical qualms, and my love of life and physical experience, the draw of a virtual reality without this physical experience is really strong, especially when I’m down in the dumps of my body problems.
which is obviously false, but this is how it feels.
or, in the vast majority of cases, more controllable than my body problems.
in any meaningful capacity, beyond “don’t step on the cracks” and “if you do something with your left limb you must do it with your right limb too”.
and without any magic powers to compensate :(
which, unlike the other books I mentioned thus far, is otherwise not that good.
even though it’s not actually about itching. Actually, when I went to go find this quote, I thought it was about itching—I didn’t remember the knife. That’s just how my mind remembered the scene.
there has to be a good gif for this but I couldn’t find it :(
Following is a quote from perhaps my actual favorite book ever, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
talking with my roommate has helped solidify these points in my mind, ty for your conversation service 🙏
Despite both of these movies seemingly answering, “yes, there is something good about the ur-world,” they actually both offer excuses out of inherent ur-world goodness. In The Matrix, the ur-world is better than the non-ur-world because the non-ur-world is like,,, bad and overrun with terrible things, and in Inception, the ur-world is better than the non-ur-worlds because the non-ur-worlds are each tailored to a single person and don’t have like,,, unique automatous life forms.