nathan’s Reviews > Famesick > Status Update

The next day, we drove up to Pismo Beach, where we screwed up our hotel reservations and had to spend a night at a Marriott, in a room with a view of the strip mall parking lot. I was still chewing two Percocet every morning, even though it had been three months since surgery, and I spent most of my free time in bed.

Killing yourself slowly to say sorry to someone else isn’t just useless—it’s cowardly.

In the photo I insisted my doctor show me, it was lying on a blue surgical cloth, a shiny cartoon character, my fallopian tubes reaching out like arms. All she needed was some white gloves, and she could have been a children’s character.

aka my period running in reverse, so that my stomach was full of menstrual blood. My ovary had settled on the sacral muscles in my back, which was affecting my gait—hence the need for a walker that past summer. Let’s please not even talk about my uterine lining. The only beautiful detail was that the organ—which was meant to be shaped like a lightbulb—was shaped like a heart.

Somehow, no matter how hard life had gotten, making the show itself had always had a lightness, a joy. Now it was like a nightmare vacation, the kind that starts with food poisoning and ends with someone in jail framed for drug trafficking.

But the thing about standing for something? It’s very tempting, because it makes you feel important. And, as someone who has quit highly addictive drugs, I can tell you: Feeling important is even harder to kick.

I may not have been a person who met Oprah, but I was a person who almost met Oprah, and that was good enough for me.

Getting sick is no different than getting more famous. A maddening circularity, it’s very hard to explain, even to the people closest to you. When you’re sick, one medication causes side effects that must be treated by another, more drastic drug. If you’ve publicly fucked up before, you have to be careful all the time not to reignite a dormant story, to have past mistakes create future discomfort.

I sounded delusional and petulant, like someone who wanted to be able to have every version of my life happening in tandem, with no understanding of the immense privileges of the version I had. And that’s probably just what I was—after all, I was only twenty-seven.

But if I ever wanted a lesson in the way that a willful misperception can escalate and become a funhouse mirror for people’s sense of their own righteousness, for their unbridled rage, this was it. (I did not, by the way, really want the lesson.)