Mistress of My Microbiome

Shaky Hands, Elusive Consciousness, and a Schedule II Hallucinogen.

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My hands are shaking as I try to eat my toast. “Stop it,” I tell them. They don’t listen. Maybe the toast is shaking, I tell myself. The challah with butter and salt (I forgot to buy salted butter) is just wiggling with joy as it is about to be eaten, like my aunt’s dachshund who is so excited to see a new person come into the house that she wiggles so hard she pees on the floor. 

The laptop is shaking as I try to type this. “Stop it,” I say again, although I don’t think my hands can shake the laptop. They can’t; the coffee table I’m working on top of is half on the rug and half off; it’s shaking because it’s on unsteady ground. I lift the coffee table and move the rug. The laptop is stable now, but my fingers aren’t. I ended the last sentence with a comma three times because my pinky couldn’t hit the period key. 

I try to eat the toast again. It’s still shaking as I lift it. If there were tomatoes on it, too much jam, blackberries, or whatever else young people in New York put on toast to make themselves feel better about the world they live in, it wouldn’t be on the toast anymore. It would be on my lap, on my shirt, on the recently stabilized coffee table. No eating anything that can spill today, I think. I hear Seinfeld in my head, “No soup for you.” No soup for me. 

I’m pretty sure my hands shaking is no big deal. A little while ago, something weird happened to my body, which is never a particularly ideal description for something happening to your body. It really wasn’t a big deal, I keep saying, an irritating evolution of genetic migraines or an unfortunately timed esophageous revolt—no big deal. My hands are shaking, probably from the stress, from the exhaustion, from the lack of caffeine that I keep getting myself addicted to. 

“Your hands are shaking,” I tell myself. “That’s fine. It’s fine if you make typos. Your water bottle has a lid; you won’t spill anything. Just breathe through it.” 

I did. It was hours before they stopped shaking. I don’t know why they did.

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Brain, Knees and Brain 

I have always believed in the mind-body connection. I don’t think that meditation will stop me from getting sick or anything, but I know how my body behaves in accordance with my mind and vice versa. When I’m stressed, the tops of my thighs ache. From knee to hip, it feels like someone has beaten me with a baseball bat for breaking up with their younger sister at prom or something. There is nothing that will make it go away, no massages, no Epsom salt baths, no fancy pain creams until I fix whatever is stressing me out. 

My mind-body connection is not that powerful, though. I’m like a demi-god in my own body, with enough divinity to control some functions but not everything. I can slow my heart rate to stave off a panic attack, but all the concentration in the world won’t get rid of a hangnail. 

I guess there’s never anything that we can control all of, really. There’s always the weather, wherever you go, whatever you do. There’s traffic, or an emergency at work, or someone’s dress has a wine stain. That’s life. Some of us are better at accepting it than others (I used to be terrible at accepting life as it was, but now I’ve started annoying people with my nonchalance). But we can chalk it up to external forces, blame them, and absolve ourselves of the responsibility. 

It’s harder to do that with the body. Sure, there are the external causes, illness or air pollution, too much pollen, or not enough sunshine. But I am in control of so much within my body that not being in control of something is dissonant. There is something that is causing my hands to shake, and I can’t do anything about it. 

I should be able to do something; after all, they’re my hands. The fact that I can’t is scaring me. I ask myself why I can’t stop it, why I can’t will it away, why I can’t control it. For the first time since having food poisoning in college, I am afraid of my own body. My hands are shaking, but it feels like my soul is, too. 

Angel Dust (Which Is Not A Half-Bad Nickname For Your Girlfriend)

If I had the chance to do one drug with absolutely no consequences, I would do PCP. 

PCP, also known as angel dust, is, in terribly complex medical terms, an insane drug. On PCP, you basically have drug-induced schizophrenia. You also, and this is the reason I’d try it, have the ability to act in ways that the normal human body should not be able to. I’ve heard stories about people destroying cop cars from the inside out, a man in a traffic accident who dictated his will to the paramedics as three of his organs were sitting on the street next to him, a young woman breaking a grown man’s femur with just her hands.

Now, of course, PCP doesn’t actually change your body’s abilities; it just shuts you off from all external sensation. You could do all of that without PCP; you just really don’t want to. Hence why I would only try PCP if I didn’t have to face the consequences afterward—because there would be consequences. 

I’m not going to do PCP. But, if I did, which I won’t, I think it might be the most liberating experience of my life. I think it might be the one time where I feel entirely in control of my own body. Not that I would remember it when I woke up. 

I started thinking about PCP when my hands were shaking, a perfectly normal, and frankly benign, consequence of...something. On PCP, it’s you and your drug-addled mind. No pain, no fear, just you. 

I used to think that I was the only one inside my body. Well, just me and the little goblin that comes out every other Thursday at 11:45 pm and tells me to watch The Departed right then and there (fortunately, I have consistently come to my senses since The Departed is two hours and 30 minutes long, and I work on Fridays). 

It’s not just me and my desires, though. There’s an autonomic nervous system, stem cells, a brain, and somewhere within that brain, a consciousness. That consciousness has created me, though I know that the me that I see and the me that you see are different. It’s like our consciousnesses are on a date, each forming pictures of ourselves and the other. How cute. 

I don’t control any of that. Those functions have made me; I have not made them. So it is not just me in here, in this shell of a body that feels like it’s breaking down, day by day, bruise by bruise.

It is me and neurons, me and blood vessels, me and an elusive consciousness. Me and the electricity of my brain. Me and my shaky hands. 

None of that would disappear on PCP. Well, as a result of my behavior, blood vessels, neurons, and other associated limbs might disappear. But those other parts of my body wouldn’t rule me. This self that my consciousness has created, this me trapped inside a body that doesn’t do what I want. I would be in control. Whatever “I” am. 

But without the use of a pretty illegal drug (schedule II, which I have some issues with), I’m stuck with partial custody of my own body. It’s like I’m in one of those cars they teach you to drive in—I’ve got the wheel and the gas, but someone else has a second wheel and the brakes. 

All I want, all I wanted when my hands started shaking and even after they stopped, was to be in total control. To be able to tell my body what to do, not the other way around. I am so big in my mind but so small in my body. 

String Cheese and Consciousness, Two Things I Can’t Digest

I have felt humbled many times in my life. You don’t fall up the stairs as much as I do without racking up a lot of humble points. But when I sat in bed in a mostly unfurnished apartment, alone in the first place I have ever lived by myself, half watching TV and half watching my hands, I have never felt so humbled in all my life. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even type, really. So I sat. And I waited. And eventually, the shaking stopped. 

I don’t know why it stopped. I don’t know what caused it. It could have many roots, all of which are out of my control. My body sometimes clues me in, like the knowledge of why my thighs hurt or how to pull myself back from panic. But it withholds, too, the power to heal, to still my hands. There are things I can do to help, of course, changing the root causes, sleeping more, eating better, and taking the proper medication.

But that’s not control; that’s being the assistant to my own body, handing it the scalpel instead of doing the surgery myself. I felt very small when my hands were shaking. I still do. That’s why I’m writing about it, to try and make myself bigger, if not in my own mind, then at least in yours. 

My body and I play by different rules. My body knows me, whatever I am, but I can never know the totality of my body. My consciousness, the inner workings of the mind-body connection, whatever happens to my guts when I eat even the smallest amount of cheese, it’s all a mystery. Well, the cheese thing isn’t, but I’m going to pretend that it is so that I can still live with myself when I make bad cheese-related decisions. 

There are a lot of people that think about this, clergy, philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, other-ologists. They’re all looking for the answers about consciousness, about the physical impact of prayer, about why we can convince our bodies to obey us sometimes but not others. I hope they find what they’re looking for, even if it isn’t definitive. And when, or if, they do, I’ll read about it. 

While they look and research, though, I have to make peace with my hands. With being out of control of my own body sometimes, with handing the wheel over to a part of me that I don’t understand and maybe can’t access. I don’t know why my hands stopped shaking; maybe I needed food or more rest, or maybe whatever it was simply ran its course. I may never understand. So I’ll hypothesize about PCP, about being in control, and try to make sure that if my hands shake again, I’m not eating soup.