This afternoon I had the intention of participating in two of Matt’s dance workshops. (He’s teaching the second one now.) However, my body had other plans. When I went to bed last night, I was itchy all over, tired. When I woke up this morning, my cough had gotten worse–dryer, deeper. I’m assuming all of this is due to allergies, perhaps a side effect of the steroid I’m taking. Either way, I’m not impressed and am writing now in hopes of getting home and going to bed as soon as possible. Since I’m teaching a private lesson in an hour, I’ll probably have to finish this later, but a start is a start. I guess some days the best you can do is go through the motions.

Yesterday during our dance lesson, Matt asked me how he could keep his feet under his body when dancing to fast music. I said, “Not to be a shitty dance instructor, but the answer to the question is within the question. In other words, when dancing to fast music, you keep your feet under your body.” Well, today when Matt asked me how I was feeling and I told him, I said, “I’m really not a good sick person. I wish I could stop whining, but I don’t know how to.” So he said, “The answer to the question is within the question–you stop whining.”

Don’t it suck when people use your own wisdom against you?

After the private lesson today, I’m looking at a three-hour drive home. Personally, I hate traveling when I’m sick. That being said, I’ve driven an entire day with a sinus infection before and have flown with a stomach flu of biblical proportions on more than one occasion, so I know that if I can fly with a virus six miles above the earth and not puke on a stranger, I can make it back to Arkansas with a cough. Really, when I start comparing this illness to others I’ve survived, it’s pretty small potatoes. What’s three hours in a car? I don’t have a fever and I’m certainly not throwing up. So even though this feels as if it’s going to last forever, it probably won’t.

Get a grip, Marcus.

Okay, it’s about time to teach.

All right, I’m back. The lesson went well, but I currently feel like death. In fact, here’s my latest selfie.

I remember getting the flu right after my first broken heart. I wasn’t out at the time, so when people asked me what happened to X, I just said our friendship didn’t work out. The downside to a lie like this, of course, is that a broken heart gets suffered alone. So this fever, body aching thing happened, and I was out for ten days. I didn’t leave the house once, just slept on the futon and watched Turner Classic Movies. And whereas I’m sure I had a virus, I don’t think the fact that it happened right after the secret breakup was a coincidence. As I think about it now, my heart was shattered, so how could my body not follow suite?

One of my favorite authors and speakers is a doctor named Gabor Mate, and he talks a lot about the connection between stress or trauma and the physical body, the fact that getting sick is often the body’s way of saying no to something the person (through no fault of their own) is unable to. Anyway, seen in this light, sickness could be seen as the organism’s way of communicating, “We can’t live like this anymore. Acknowledge your broken heart. Come out of the closet. Something’s got to change.”

I often hesitate to launch into theories like this one, since it could sound like people get sick because they are doing something wrong. (That’s what you get for being in the closet!) However, this isn’t what the theories are saying. The idea is that, for example, if a person grows up and doesn’t know about boundaries–say they’re always doing things for other people but never for themselves–then sometimes the body will develop an illness as a way of bringing attention back to the self and establishing proper relationships. It’s like an alarm saying, “Houston, we have a problem.” I realize this is a brief, unscientific explanation, but there’s actually a lot of research behind it. (If you’re interested, look for Gabor Mate’s book, When the Body Says No.)

Anyway, I’m not saying I want to rearrange my life every time I get a common cold, but since I’ve had this infection for five weeks, I am starting to wonder if my body is saying no to something. I know I spend a lot of time getting frustrated with my body–I want it to look or feel differently than it does. But I can only imagine how frustrated my body gets with me, since I’m constantly go-go-going, don’t always eat right, and don’t always sleep much. One of my friends said that once during meditation she got an image of her body wagging its finger at her, like, “You are not twenty anymore–you’ve got to take better care of us.” And maybe it’s that simple, this sickness, just my body’s way of saying, “Please rest–like for more than a weekend.

“And no, this is not our idea of resting.”

Another thing I think about is that perhaps sickness actually gives me permission to whine. Not that I think whining and complaining are good ideas, but sometimes I think they happen because there’s something else underneath them. I know that personally I spend a lot of time trying to be strong. That probably started when Mom got sick and really kicked into high gear when Dad went to prison. You’re the man of the house now. Talk about a shit job for a teenager. Anyway, now I’m thirty-seven, and it still feels like I keep my muscles slightly tensed on a daily basis because I’m waiting for something else to go wrong, something I won’t be prepared to handle. Consequently, I never can fully relax–it’s exhausting. So sometimes I think getting sick is not only a chance to rest, but also an opportunity to let my guard down, ask for help, and stop being so strong for once.

I guess we all want an explanation when we don’t feel well–this happened because of that. As if life were that simple. Obviously a lot more things play into health and wellness than can be explained in a paragraph, and even the experts say we’re just starting to get a glimpse of the mind-body connection. But I personally don’t think it has to be complicated, even if it is complex. For me getting better is starting to simply look like not demanding so much of myself, not pushing myself to heal when my body obviously needs more compassion than that. Right here, right now, it looks like finishing this blog, driving back to Arkansas, going to bed, and giving my body the rest it deserves.

I’ll let you know how it goes.