Hey gang! Many apologies for my silence on this newsletter! I’ve been wrapped up in launching a fun new media company, Shut Up ‘n Eat — a podcast, a newsletter, a shop, all about food, chefs, restaurants, and the culture that surrounds them. Check it out!

At the end of April, my body begins falling apart. My left foot hurts, on the outside edge, as if a small, fine bone was about to snap. Is this from running? Or maybe… I notice that on my right leg, on the inner part just below the bulge of the calf, things are kind of achy. Why? And am I landing harder on my left foot to take weight off my right?

Then there is my right wrist. It hurts, on the top side, but only when I put pressure on it, like you would for a push-up. Which doesn’t happen unless I go rock climbing and have to do a mantle move. Which is … often. It hurts bad. But then also my upper left quadrant, from the zone where my neck meets my shoulder down to the tips of my thumb and forefinger, is going wonky — at times numb, at others twinging and pained. During a shower, my hand tingles; but I can still carry groceries and heavy boxes. What I can’t do, or shouldn’t do, is run and climb. Which is all I wanted to do.

But I’m accustomed to injury. I’ve been bruised and scraped and overworked in one way or another since I was a teenage skateboarder, when I bore my wounds — a green-purple hip, a scabby elbow — as badges of honor. As an adult, however, I’ve learned that I can’t just wait 24 hours and simply be better. I need to actually take care of my ailments. And so I stretch (never enough), and I do strength exercises big and small (never with the requisite regularity), and I foam-roll, and I ice, and I elevate, and I massage. I drink tea and nibble THC gummies. I rest. I walk. I google new exercises, and I observe the other people at the climbing gym and copy their movements. I cut back on drinking and meat. I do crunches and planks because my core is the only part of me that doesn’t hurt if I use it. And still three out of four of my limbs are fucked up.

I know what’s wrong, more or less. Posterior shin splints in my right leg. A pinched nerve in my neck. Tendonitis in my right wrist. (The potential stress fracture in my left foot has mercifully vanished.) And I know the treatment plans for these. Heel raises with a tennis ball, nerve flossing, a wrist brace at night. More than a month of these (and more) has had no effect. I saw a chiropractor: He made “adjustments” and shot the affected areas with a laser — a high-tech treatment that cost an extra $60 — and I felt the same as if I’d never visited him, only $400 poorer. Still, he did say I have good posture!

The maddening thing is that I’m not really injured. Nothing is damaged — no muscles torn, no bones broken. The healing my body needs to do isn’t the prosaic kind of repair I could track and measure.

Instead, shit is inflamed, out of control. The connective tissue — tendons, nerves, ligaments, whatever — is angrily demanding that I cease and desist from my normal regiment of activity. And I do! I am an appeaser. I stop running, I stop climbing. I sit at the computer all day long, sometimes with an ice pack on my wrist or ankle, and only occasionally go up and down the three flights of our apartment building. The connective tissue remains pissed off. Nothing calms it down.

And so this is where I turn to Dr. Sarno. ⬇️

If you know Dr. Sarno’s name, then you know where this is going. If you don’t, then: John Sarno was a doctor at NYU from 1965 until many decades later; his specialty was rehabilitation. (He died in 2017, one day shy of his 94th birthday.) His signature insight was that much of chronic pain, if not all of it, is psychosomatic. The stress of our lives, our striving for perfection, isn’t just psychological stress. It has a real, physical effect. “The mind and the body are intimately connected,” Sarno said. And while we may know that in theory, we — both patients and our health-care providers² — rarely treat it as real.

Dr. Sarno treated it as real. He called the disorder “tension myositis syndrome,” or TMS. And his treatment plan was to address the underlying psychology behind the epidemic of chronic pain in this country. He wasn’t a crank. His patients included Howard Stern, Senator Tom Harkin, and Larry David — not the type of kvetchers to buy into and extol miracle cures. A Facebook friend of mine, Michael Galinsky, who suffered from decades of back pain, made this documentary about Sarno’s life and theories:

For years, I had seen Dr. Sarno’s name in the ether — through posts by Galinsky and others — and I’d noticed one of his books, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders, on display in my dermatologist’s office. And so, on June 1, when I visited the skin doctor for one of our semiannual appointments, I have a feeling I know how he’ll respond when I present to him my litany of pains. (My skin, it must be said, is as stunning and dewy as ever.) Dr. Seidenberg picks up the book and tells me to read it. It cured him, he says, adding that you can read it free on the Libby app. Instead, I buy it used on eBay¹ for about five bucks.

Even before it arrives, I know this: I do not need to be persuaded. I have not been diagnosed by an armada of specialists. I don’t have any medications beyond ibuprofen. I am not tied to the medical establishment’s traditional approach to pain, rehabilitation, and physical therapy. More like the opposite — all those have already failed me. I would like to try something new. If I can fix my wrist, my neck, my leg by fixing my soul, then goddamit let’s fix my soul!

And stress? Yeah, I’ve got some! I was laid off from my job in March and am currently uninsured. I’m a writer at a time when the media business is flailing and imploding and unlikely suddenly to right itself. I am nearly 52 years old! It is no stretch to accept that the psychological circumstances of my life might be causing some literal pain.

But what I don’t know is what Sarno’s version of soul-fixing actually looks like. Is this going to be a born-again moment, in which I proclaim my belief that my pains are psychosomatic and am instantly, rapturously healed? Do I need to master arcane philosophy, as I once memorized the steps that took Descartes from cogito ergo sum to proof of the existence of God? I dread woo-woo in general, and I suspect I’ll see woo-woo here, beneath the Bernie Sanders quotes and the high production values.

The book arrives. Ι immediately skip over the introduction, the history, the explanations and go straight to chapter four: “Treatment.” What do I do? I want to know.

There is still some preamble, some throat-clearing, some elaboration. Addressing “a particularly intelligent but somewhat skeptical patient,” Dr. Sarno tells her, “What you need to get better, my friend, is not a leap of faith but a leap of understanding.” He comes back to this again and again. A TMS sufferer has to have a real grasp of this mind-body connection and how it works (or fails to work), and then needs to “accept” the idea as well. Not belief but acceptance. “Reality,” wrote Philip K. Dick, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.“ Reality can only be accepted.

I accept reality.

Ten pages into the chapter, Dr. Sarno reveals the approach: “You are going to change your brain’s program by thinking about certain things every day until the pain stops.” This will work, he says, for about 80 percent of people doing it on their own; the rest may want to speak with a psychologist. And he lays out a daily routine in admirable detail:

“You must sit down and think about these things every day,” he writes. “This is the way the ideas get from your conscious mind to your unconscious mind. That’s where they have to get to in order for the brain to stop the process.”

And that, {{first_name|my friend}}, is where I stop reading. Because for more than a year and a half now, I have been writing this newsletter, Trying!, in which I have been grappling with all of these issues — not least of which is my unquenchable rage — at length. I have written hundreds of thousands of words delving into the sources of my anger, my attempts to understand and explain them to myself and to you, to bring them out from my unconscious into the pixelated, analytical light of our screens. I have traced my rage in excruciating detail from childhood to Wall Street and the White House. How, after all of these motherfucking essays (now available in book form!), could some quantum of fury still remain unpinpointable in my psyche? At this stage of my literary self-autopsy, I should be the most pain-free schmuck on the planet.

But I’m not. Which could mean a few different things. The first is that Dr. Sarno’s advice doesn’t work, or doesn’t work for me in particular. Hey, it happens! I often give friends and strangers loads of well-researched practical advice that many of them casually and inexplicably ignore. Oh, well! Just because it didn’t work for them doesn’t mean it was bullshit to begin with.

Another possibility is that I just have not yet finished my opus of anger. There remain so many people and phenomena that cause me “unconscious painful and threatening feelings” that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. More essays, and only more essays, can bring about the relief I crave! The problem there, though, is that the list is truly endless — by the time I cross everything off my current Sarnovian hate-list, doubtless hundreds of new items will have been added, and thousands more by the time I finish those, and so on ad infinitum. I am a black hole of anger, swelling inexorably until the heat death of the universe.

Even that, though, imagines the process as a realistic endeavor, in the Sisyphean mode: The boulder is real (I accept that!), and I will just have to push it up Mount Tartarus for all eternity.

But what if the boulder were invisible? Or not even a boulder but some other object beyond my vision, beyond my imagination — a hypercube of fury? What if, I’m saying, there were things I’m angry about that even I don’t know I’m angry about? How does one identify a mysterious rage? How does one trace it back, find its causes, and contemplate, analyze, and neuter them?

I have spent all these months and all these words in an obsessive attempt at self-examination, hoping to understand better who I am and why I do what I do, for no other reason than that it’s necessary. (And also sometimes amusing!) I can’t not do it. Now, however, I’m worried that I’m missing something essential, that I’m blindly circling some aspect of myself that in the absence of a job — and, perhaps, a purpose — has wrapped its grubby tentacles around my nerves and tendons and squeezed. How can I find it? In the decades-long dark night of the soul, how can any of us, especially those of us with failing low-light vision, see what’s going on with any clarity?

For the moment, I’m going to go with an old favorite: magical thinking. With any luck, the moment I press “send” on this newsletter — which is clearly a significant and heartfelt attempt to deal with the rage fueling my pain — my symptoms will suddenly vanish, and I’ll be the strong, limber boy you remember well from two months ago. If that doesn’t work, perhaps I will appeal to you all to upgrade to paid subscriptions; a little more monthly income would doubtless remove stress from my spirit. And if, finally, even that fails, there’s always acupuncture. And whiskey. 🪨🪨🪨