the 13th rib

and other things that have happened to me this week

Is there such a thing as an inherent personality trait? I used to think so. In each of us, I believe that most people can think of at least one facet of their reality that appears to be inert; no matter how many times you’ve tried to train yourself out of it, it keeps coming back. For me, it’s chewing my nails all the way down to the finger beds. The personality trait this betrays is my neuroticism. I need everything in my life to be perfectly in order and this applies, very strictly, to each of my stubby nails. If one breaks, they all have to go. I do not know how to get rid of this compulsion on purpose. I may, however, have discovered that I can get rid of it on accident.

I had formed an image of myself as the kind of person who refuses to wait to seek medical care upon discovering a potentially pressing issue. I’ve known that this image was on shaky ground because I recognized that I had been ignoring a strange feeling, a hard thing poking out of my left side torso and against my stomach lining, for almost two years. I compartmentalize information, but I am always aware of what is happening. Some part of me, upon realizing that there was a lump in my body that didn’t used to be there, assumed that it must be something that will kill me and so shut down any opportunity for a doctor to sit me down and tell me my days are numbered. Really, this is what I’m afraid of; less so of suffering the indignity of dying, but of being told what the future holds, that it actually is over. What would I have to look forward to then? I shudder to think of it. Well, no more of that! No doctor will be telling me about my life! And so the image has been shattered in favor of self-determination. If you want to call it that. I am now a person who avoids the doctor because they do not want to be told that they are dying, as opposed to a person who goes to the doctor because they do not want to die. Just like that!

Well, I’ve found out that this faulty sense of self features layers of ignorance. Not only am I not dying, but I have had this medical “problem” my entire life. In fact, I had always been someone who ignores what’s happening in my body. I can think of no other answer for why I didn’t immediately recognize what the issue might be. As the nurse practitioner at the ZoomCare felt along my ribs, her eyes widened. Here we go, I thought. It’s a tumor, of course, I knew all along… Quickly, her right hand jumped over to my right side, feeling around in confusion, clearly grasping for something that didn’t exist, like trying to pick up a speck of dirt between your fingers. Back on the other side, she pushed on the hard lump and said, in awe, “Did you know that you have thirteen ribs on your left side?”

I must not know myself well at all, given that I have an extra rib on my left side and am just now, at twenty-seven years old, being informed of its existence. I’d had another doctor tell me that I just had a slipped rib (of normal numerical existence)¹ and that it would probably resolve on its own. Another said that I had an enlarged spleen and to go get bloodwork done immediately. As I said previously, I have little interest in being told that something is seriously wrong with me, so I chose to believe that this was false. And, lo and behold, I was the one who was right. I can choose to believe that I was just misled by multiple doctors and I probably will. Still, I think it’s worth considering what else I might be missing about my body or my life. What are my other thirteenth ribs? The nurse seemed so confused. I started to feel some amount of shame for how much I didn’t know.

“So… no one has ever told you that this exists?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever play a sport? I’m just curious if you ever felt a tugging in your side, or a twinge that might’ve tipped you off.”

“I didn’t play any sports. Well. That’s not true. I tried sports. I was never an athlete.” I thought on this one for a few more seconds while she struggled to type out, in the existing medical terminology, what she’d just discovered inside my body. “I guess I usually get pain on that side when I run. Like, always right there. But I just thought that was because I was out of shape.”

“Have you considered that you might be out of shape because working out causes you pain?” She smiled as she said this, but I took her at face value. Maybe I’m out of shape because working out causes me pain. Did working out cause me pain? I just said that it did. I never thought of it as painful, though. Because working out is supposed to be painful, so it’s sort of redundant to think of it as this extra painful thing. Unless it’s not supposed to be painful? Is it not supposed to be painful?

I’ve been thinking about February 26th as the official date of my Saturn return. I wrote about the concept of a Saturn return last summer, in the context of Jersey Shore, but I don’t think I was truly in the throes of growing pains like I am now. I was still watching Jersey Shore, intentionally interacting with things that reminded me of being a child. Unlike the me that existed in June of last year, I can feel my brain growing more every day. I get excited to think about things that confuse me. Life is starting to open up again; I feel less like my life is ending because I’m twenty-seven and more like I finally have the wisdom to understand what I want out of life. One of the main things I want is self understanding!

This is why I chose February 26th; I had an intense connection with The 1975’s sophomore record I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it when I was a pretentious and emotional teenager and I let it take over my life and shape me into someone new. The person I am today is heavily informed by that record, by the references that were mixed into it: The French Situationists, Debord, Godard, May 1968, New Wave, New Romanticism, David Lynch, Aphex Twin, dream pop and anti-religious attitudes and high-low aesthetics. I’m grateful to have had that or, maybe more generously, to have been the kind of teenager that actually reads the books a rock star mentions in an interview. That being said, I can’t rely on these things forever. You are not your references, even more so if those references were curbed from other people. I haven’t considered myself a Situationist with a straight face in many years now,² and I think that’s even more reason to move on and forge a new path. It’s not like I was following the ideology very well; I was essentially consuming the ideology through the commodity that was that record, which is the opposite of the point. Who am I as a person and an artist without latching onto someone else’s art for safety? I want to figure that out.

The day of the 26th was more difficult than I was anticipating. I stayed home that night, listened to the album, and forced myself to think about how much time had passed since the day it came out, when I came down with a fever in the first hour of school and spent the rest of it in the nurses office in and out of consciousness, listening to it for the first time, letting it sink into my over-heated brain and do its permanent damage. I remembered driving around town with copies of the CD to give to friends like an evangelist. I remembered being excited. I couldn’t think of the last time I was truly excited. I was excited about the art show I helped put on last year, surely, but that was mingled with the fear of being seen, fear that someone I knew would watch the film I’d made for the gallery and know me. I realized that I was afraid of the concept of being understood. Obfuscating my desires for the convenience of others feels safe, but it has meant that I have lost touch with what those desires even are.

So: I have twenty-five ribs inside of my body. I love writing and the way it makes me feel, even when I know it’s not very good, like what I’m writing now. I read a Sheila Heti piece in Granta this week, the one about psychedelic therapies, and it inspired me to try guided ketamine therapy, so maybe I will become someone that does that. I love watching movies with long, boring scenes where nothing happens. I love reading long, boring books where nothing happens. I think friendship is the most romantic thing in the world. I saw a photograph of four old men on a bench at the Portland Art Museum on Valentine’s Day and I pointed and said to my boyfriend, “Look, that’s gonna be you and the boys!” And I cried. I hid my tears, but I cried. I love feeling kind of crazy and unruly and that’s why I also love music and why I prefer when music is loud and fast and weird and angry. I went off the pill so I can feel crazier once a month again but I’m planning on getting an IUD³ because I think it’s okay to admit that I don’t like kids. Writing about all of the above is probably the only purpose I have. I don’t care about my career very much. I do care about what happens to my writing or whether I get to write. I want to get good at it. I want to get very, very good at it.

And, if I have to, I guess I’ll get the rib removed.

1. Technically the extra rib is also a slipped rib, so she wasn’t far off. It is extra and it is slipped and it is pushing into my stomach in an uncomfortable way! I have no idea how rare this is but every medical professional I’ve interacted with so far has been dumbfounded. The possibility of a case study was brought up.

2. You know what though? Maybe I should!

3. Kind of a Lorde-coded post this time! X-rays, IUDs, crying, the concept of Ribs!