Notes to Self

Since the age of twenty-seven, I’ve experienced chronic pelvic pain. It’s been unsusceptible to treatment—and for many years, to diagnosis. Before I published Life is Hard, almost no-one knew this about me; now you can read it in a book.

While writing it, I did six months of pelvic floor therapy, with the tepid endorsement of my urologist. The first session was largely diagnostic, beginning with questions from a friendly physical therapist:

Do you have difficulty urinating?

How often do you go in a typical night?

Do you feel like your internal organs are falling out of your body through your anus?

I enjoyed the Mad Libs quality of question three: “Do you feel your lungs ascending through your elbows? Your eyeballs exiting through your ears?” Every so often, a patient must thrill to the unexpected precision: “Yes, that is exactly what I feel.” Maybe if I’d answered yes, physical therapy would have worked; instead, it made me focus on my pain, and thinking about it only made it worse.

An odd…