The ebb and flow in our veins

If my stomach were a person instead of a squishy organ, it would take the form of a cantankerous old man. It's irascible and fickle. It's full of prejudices. It reacts poorly when forced to encounter anything too flashy or spicy or unfamiliar. It will grumble loudly and without warning at the slightest provocation. I find myself frequently having to soothe and placate it with Tums.

Also, my stomach—like a paternalistic grandpa—thinks that it knows what's best for me, and it has a tendency to argue with me about how I should be feeling about things. Paranoid and inclined to excessive worry, my stomach makes for a poor ally in stressful situations.

This past Monday, for example, I took the most intense exam of my graduate career: a two-hour ordeal that involved a committee of professors questioning me on a list of a hundred-ish texts. As far as intellectual hurdles go, the major field exam is certainly not more difficult than writing a dissertation, but it's an intensely compact stress-delivery system. It's the only time that I'll be asked to recall so much, out loud and on command, in such a short period of time. 

I'd been slowly and methodically preparing for this exam for over a year, but beginning about two weeks ago, I buckled down into severe study-hibernation mode. At that point, so close to the exam, my brain was satisfied that I was prepared, or at least that I was capable of getting prepared in the time remaining. I'd read all the books; I had a firm grasp of the things I wanted to talk about; I'd picked out my exam-day outfit. My brain, in other words, gave me every reason to feel calm and confident.

My stomach wasn't so sure. WHY AREN'T YOU MORE WORRIED?? it silently screamed. THIS IS A BIG DEAL. YOU SHOULD BE MORE ANXIOUS. IT'S IMPORTANT TO ME THAT YOU FEEL WORSE ABOUT THIS. Patronizingly sure that my brain was lying to me and my rational placidity was a sure sign of disaster and despair, my stomach inflicted me with surges of acid reflux and nausea. THERE, YOU SEE? I could feel it smugly concluding, THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD REALLY BE FEELING.

My stomach has pulled this kind of trick before; it threw similar tantrums back when I was deciding between grad schools, when I moved out to Boston, during numerous final exam seasons. My brain reassured me, as it had in the past, that my stomach was overreacting. It implored me to ignore the acid and trust the logical evidence it was giving me, all of which suggested that I was ready. 

Brain and gut continued to wrestle for dominance (Brain: You're fine! Stomach: NO YOU'RE NOT!) until the exam actually occurred. Luckily, in the exam room itself, all this internal meta-commentary went out the window and I simply flew forward as an integrated human prattling on about psychology and Modern British literature.

Now that I've passed my exam and received the Congratulations!s and I knew you could do it!s, it might feel natural to scoff at my stomach and assume that my brain was the one that really knew what was up all along. My curmudgeonly stomach makes much ado, it appears, about nothing. 

Wouldn't it be better, I sometimes muse, if I could simply chuck out my stomach, my nerves? If my brain and I could hold hands and skip happily into the sunset, unencumbered by the strutting and fretting of my body?

It's a dangerous idea, and a bad one.

Forty-eight hours before my exam, I was informed of the unexpected death of a friend of mine from my grad program, an acquaintance I'd taken classes with, socialized with, chatted with on the bus. He was sweet, thoughtful, habitually self-deprecating, prone to saying extremely intelligent things and then kind of wincing from having spoken. Three days after my exam, I sat in a seminar room with six of my other grad-school companions, processing the loss with a school psychologist.

In that room, I became aware of that familiar struggle between brain and body. My mind was intellectualizing on full throttle, attempting to discern what my friends expected or needed from me, attempting to respond appropriately. The mental effort of it was so strong I wasn't conscious of having any particular emotion. Emotion was my body's problem. I felt my eyes and throat swelling and a dull ache in my stomach. My hands and legs would shake with startling and unpredictable severity. It's prompted me to reflect on how much knowledge is housed outside of my brain, to confront the limits of what it's capable of doing. I offload the worst of my stress, grief, and anxiety to other, more capable parts of my body; my mind admits only what it can handle. 

My memories of Ben are housed not only in my brain, but in me. Recalling information can be a purely intellectual enterprise. But remembering a person is always a visceral experience, a feeling as well as a thought. You hear their voice, you see their face, you feel your body remembering how you smiled or rolled your eyes. I'm grateful to have had a part of his life as a part of mine.

"In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this—and much more than this is true—why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love."
 - Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room