[APPLAUSE]
So this is my book.
I'm going to read to you from my book.
The essays are too long to keep you here listening to,
so I'm going to read you part of one.
And then for $17.95, you can find out
what happens afterwards.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read from an essay that is about--
the whole book is about my body, other bodies,
bad things we do to bodies.
And I'm going to read from an essay that
is about my body and the gym and a time when
I tried too hard to be strong.
The essay is called Sick Gainz.
"In 2016, I was living in Honolulu,
and I ran so many miles that my heel bone cracked.
I had just started to run when I felt it--
a loud hot twinge in my right foot, as if
a piece of cherry red steel was slicing through me
from ankle to sole.
When I was honest with myself, and it took several days
before I was able to be so, I admitted
that I had felt this pain for weeks, perhaps months, just
quieter, soft enough to ignore.
The mornings always smelled like plumeria and sweet rolls
in Palolo, the valley where I like to run.
On the particular morning when I finally cracked my heel,
I'd had a perfect amount of coffee
and had gotten enough sleep to power me through the 10 miles
on my running docket.
First, to the back of the valley behind the Zen Center.
Back in the lush crevice between the ridges of the Ko'olau
mountain range, crispy mountain apples
like sweet cucumbers that leave your mouth feeling wet and dry
at the same time.
They grow by the side of the road,
and there's a small store where you
can get sodas and poke bowls.
When the pain announced itself, I
immediately turned up the music in my headphones
and took a series of deep breaths,
trying to send the sensation somewhere else.
This is the thing I know how to do--
depart my body.
Be elsewhere.
It almost always works.
I can slide a needle into my flesh without flinching.
I can look you in the eye while you punch me in the face.
And yet, on this particular day, in the hot, sweet, wet air,
the pain in my foot overtook me and I had to stop moving.
On the big screen in my sports medicine doctor's office,
the imaging looked accusatory.
The cup of my heel bone, the calcaneus
was split nearly in half.
'It had been broken for a while,' he explained to me,
tapping on the screen with the butt end of his pen to indicate
the broadening crack between two pieces of my bone.
I had run more than 100 miles on a broken heel.
There were good reasons for all this running.
Some were athletic.
At five years into my obsessive relationship
with long-distance running, I had
found an intensity in my training
that had previously eluded me.
Others were questions of identity
that were soothed by hours of fast-pounding pavement
in 85% humidity.
I was getting really into my thirties
and it was starting to show in the slope of my ass
and the cracks next to my eyes.
I had tabled my ego inflating career and the bags of money
that came with it for a dubiously charted stab
at a creative life.
Everything was uncertain, except the mile.
In the mile, I could pour myself into pain and exhaustion
and let go of all the big questions
for a relentless series of the same small question-- quit
or keep going.
And so I kept going.
20 miles a week, then 30, 40 through a pain that perhaps I
had known wasn't normal.
It doesn't matter whether I knew or not,
because after two months of hot twinge in my right foot,
that day finally came when I lacked the capacity to ignore it
for one more second.
'You got to take a rest,' my young,
sexy surfer doctor told me, looking me hard in the eye.
'No marathon this year,' and there wasn't.
Some facts.
When I was young, the only important thing
was to be thin, skinny, skinny, skinny.
That's what made you beautiful in the '90s.
Thin everything.
Eyebrows like barely traced pencil lines,
thighs like long stretched out pieces of boneless chicken,
arms like little bundles of clothesline,
tiny asses disappearing under our tiny skirts, our ribs
loud, proud stripes under our gauzy going out tops.
None of these traits was natural to my physique,
so I starved myself into many hospitals,
into feeding tubes and cans of Ensure,
into a 15 years' collection of eating disorders that finally
abated in my late 20s.
I have been mostly well on that front since then.
Even as my relationship with exercise
twisted into something I was no longer at the helm of,
I had been eating good food with great pleasure
without considering vomiting it up for many years.
I mostly liked how my body looked
and I felt fully comfortable without clothes
on, though I always wished for a more feminine shape
to offset my athletic solidity.
I considered myself to be in long-term recovery
from my eating disorders, as close to normal
as someone who had been as sick as I was can get.
It looked for a long time like I was
going to be a lifer, of which there
are so many sad 40 somethings carefully counting out
pieces of celery.
It sucks and it's real, and I remain unspeakably
grateful to have been spared that long, drawn out
spiral of suffering.
But wait, my body said.
My mind had caught up to a new reality,
one in which I was healthy, an athlete, an eater of protein
and sweet potatoes, a drinker of water.
But inside me there was damage.
And not just the stuff I could see or feel.
There were things amiss--
hormone things, adrenal things, fertility things.
Even though I no longer wish to be skinny,
I was no less obsessed with my body
than I had been a decade earlier.
It had just shifted to function over form.
I first learned about physicality and endurance
from my father.
After the first time I was institutionalized as a teenager,
he began running marathons.
I hadn't yet run a mile in my life,
so I didn't understand the significance
of his daily departures in moisture
wicking fabrics and his returns, smelling of salt,
and radiating either deep self-satisfaction or bitter
disappointment.
I didn't yet understand that how fast you can travel over
10 miles of this Earth can determine whether you believe
in yourself that day or not.
I didn't yet understand that fear and pain and uncertainty
can be compressed and moved aside
by the cumulative brutality of endurance sport.
A year after my heel fractured, I visited a fertility clinic.
I had resumed running with the frantic pent-up energy
of a mouse sprung from a trap and my body
felt like a hot engine running without oil.
After mentioning that he had taught at Harvard,
the doctor looked at my medical history,
drew me two graphs and several diagrams,
and showed me a PowerPoint presentation on his early model
desktop computer.
'When you were in puberty,' he told me,
pointing at something on the computer that I
didn't understand, a gland, maybe.
'Your body was starving, and so it didn't--' There is a long
blank space there where I can remember his mouth moving and I
can remember a dull crumpling feeling behind my sternum,
but I cannot remember what he said.
And that's why you haven't gotten pregnant.
You aren't likely to be able to get
pregnant without intervention and definitely
not at your current activity levels.
I felt as though I should cry, but I also felt so separated
from my body that it would have taken effort to climb back in it
and eke tears out.
So I didn't cry.
And I didn't take notes either, which
is why I can't recall the information.
I just sat there mute as he clicked
through the rest of the PowerPoint,
and then I traipsed behind him to the exam room
where he smeared cold, sticky lubricant on an ultrasound probe
and jabbed it inside me.
My compliant legs flopping open when
he said so, closing back up when he pulled the device out of me.
I paid my bill and I walked around the parking structure
for a long time, not really looking for my truck,
just walking, wanting to remain in the interstice
of what I knew then and what I hadn't known before.
The next thing I remember is lacing my shoes up
to go for a run.
The honeymoon phase of any addictive behavior
is such a swirl of pleasurable brain chemicals
and renewed vigor for life that it is, for me, often
impossible to turn away from.
I've had it with so many things that I know it
by heart, that new relationship energy of a fresh compulsion--
bourbon, heroin, razor blades, credit cards, dangerous sex,
face-punching, cash, whiskey, bondage, check fraud, vodka,
shoplifting, ketamine, methadone, red wine, cigarettes,
work, nicotine gum.
croissants, wintergreen Skoal.
There are so many things that have, for a short while,
salved my discomforts and offered me peace and pleasure.
I loved those things once, each and all of them,
until they turned on me like they all did, like they all do.
This, of course, is the nature of compulsion.
The substance of the habit becomes
almost immaterial after so many years of trying to stuff things
into the gaping void of spiritual discomfort.
But can a spiritual hole be filled with physical acts?
And can a body be reasonably expected
to endure the battering it might take to reach serenity?
The muddled hope that the pains of the body
will beget the solace of the mind has been around for as long
as people have been keeping track of such things.
Yoga, arguably the first recorded form
of physical exercise, was developed as a practice
to gird body and mind for extended periods of meditation.
These movements will bring you closer to enlightenment.
Victorians used early treadmills as curatives
for the wicked instincts of prisoners--
these movements will bring you farther away from the devil.
There is nothing modern except the details
of how I have worn down, burned through, and used up my body.
At the end of my CrossFit classes,
we all collapsed on the ground, heaving,
flat on our backs or in the fetal position,
leaving behind sweat angels in the shape of our splayed out
bodies when we finally get up."
That's all for now.
[APPLAUSE]