Half Doses of Happy

A couple weeks ago, I had the misfortune of being kicked off my SSRI.

It wasn’t intentional, although it was as a result of my decisions. My doctor’s office had informed me, late last month, that they would be closing for a week in late August for summer vacation. They handed me a slip of paper with their vacation dates printed onto them, so that I could remember. However, that did not mean that I took it into consideration when making future decisions. Within a minute of being handed that slip of paper, I promptly lost it somewhere in my bag.

Of course, I ran out of my month’s supply of Lexapro – an antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication – the exact week my doctor’s office was closed. I called around, emailed my therapist, but couldn’t find a doctor that would give me an emergency prescription. I started to sweat.

People will tell you different things about antidepressants, and that’s the scary part. Some people will say that medication simply reset their brains. Others that they’ll make you gain weight, your libido might die, your personality will change dramatically, or that your emotions will be numbed out. Further complicating the entire process is the fact that one SSRI may not work for one person or doses may have to be tweaked. The odds of success are essentially reduced to a coin toss. Unfortunately, when you’re clinically depressed, the last thing you want to hear is that the probability of troubleshooting your brain with a particular medication is about the same as your chances of passing the California bar exam.

In my case, I lucked out on Lexapro; it was like finding a skilled plumber that would ensure that the toilet bowl of my brain would function properly. Shit happens near daily, but Lexapro would help me flush it out and the side effects have been minimal.

When I miss a dose – something that’s inadvertently happened after a long day of travel – my anxiety creeps out of its cage. Like a clogged toilet, my thoughts start to recall past events while my anxiety threatens to silently overflow into usually-stable areas of my life. The whispered stuttering of an overwhelmed toilet tank becomes the back beat of my insecurity spiking to crazy. Without my metaphorical pharmaceutical toilet plunger, I turn into a reality TV villain. 

Welcome to anxiety.

Living with this version of myself for a week sounded implausible. By my estimation, I was also running low on goodwill; asking my friends to put up with me in this state was out of the question.  By some foresight that my current self appears incapable of, I found three Lexapro pills in a travel case. I had seven days until my doctor’s office opened; if I split my pills in half, I had a chance to not lose it completely.

It was rough. Even with a half dose, I experienced withdrawal symptoms. I initially gave myself anxiety over the impending tsunami of anxiety. Throughout the week, I experienced slight nausea and an upset stomach, a decreased ability to focus, general restlessness, and significant fatigue. Work was both a welcome distraction and a source of unjustified irritation. I started craving starchy carbs but that could be due to the fact that I didn’t have much of an appetite during the day. By Day 5, I noticed that my anxiety peaked at night and into the following morning, and as a result, talked myself into believing some crazy theories about my life and self-worth. At one point during the week, I came back from the gym after a night of too little sleep and a day of too little food and wept over the certainty that I’d done nothing useful with my life.

This, I thought, this is how people join cults and get into conspiracy theories.

By the time I began to accept my constant, semi-sad, nervousness, my doctor’s office reopened and I was able to refill my prescription. I’ve felt better since, though it took a day or two, which is awesome, because I’m currently PMSing. 

I’m sorry I’m like this.

Being Michael Jordan

Two years ago, I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now in a desperate bid to stem the emotional hemorrhage caused by a bad break up. Gushing despair and heartache, I attempted to resist being washed away by my own sadness with meditation, mindfulness, a gratitude practice. Friends and a dedicated therapist pulled me through the worst of it and eventually, the easy distraction of dating, lifting, and work covered up the self-doubt and insecurity. I’d occasionally dabble in mindfulness but preferred the relative mindlessness that came with lifting. There were brief flings with confidence; even so, when my workouts were a string of messy failures and guys ghosted, I’d tried living in the present again, attempted to detach and observe my feelings pass over me as I ruminated over every sharp jab of disappointment.

It took a pandemic and Michael Jordan to finally, fully get it.

Currently my sole social outlet.

Although Tokyo’s version of lockdown was lax by U.S. standards, the public has generally continued to respect social distancing recommendations. With friends who are decent people, my social life died. Dating became similar to how I currently view doing burpees on a sweaty gym floor: potentially dangerous, probably not worth the possible benefits, and highly likely to be embarrassing given my recent Covid weight gain. Outside the sudden deluge of work assignments, I wasn’t left with much in the way of distractions. The silence was deafening.

In response, I naturally signed up for Netflix and filled my life with Denzel Washington action movies and documentaries. I hoped access to near-endless hours of TV would somehow jumpstart the mindfulness I needed at work and the mindlessness I was craving during my lifting sessions. When The Last Dance aired and became available week by week on Netflix for non-U.S. viewers, I strategically waited until it had concluded to slowly binge it at my leisure. 

The docuseries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is, thus far, the only unequivocally good thing to happen this year. The ten-part docuseries follows Michael Jordan through his career with the Chicago Bulls, culminating in the NBA championship win in the 1997-1998 season. The catharsis of re-watching the Bulls dominate the court gave me goosebumps; Michael Jordan’s sheer drive and sometimes anger-fueled performance, inspiration. But most importantly, the Greatest of All Time taught me that to live in the present isn’t limited to the sensations currently felt and smelled and heard, but also require the knowledge that the past can’t affect the now.

“Why would I worry about not making a shot I haven’t made yet,” Michael Jordan reportedly told a friend. 

I could come up with several reasons and that’s apparently the point. To succeed at anything takes intention. It’s not mindless muscle memory that marks a successful lift, but the mental capacity to treat each lift as its own, discrete event, unable to be affected by the failed lift right before it, the guy I couldn’t get a text back from, or the unhappy client. Applied to life in general, it’s essentially the ability to stop negging yourself before you even start because in this one moment, none of that other stuff matters.

The realization was embarrassingly eye-opening but simultaneously liberating. It felt like breaking through the first 20 minutes on a bike, when your body finally gives up trying to resist the forced aerobic activity and settles into a rhythm. Since being gifted this nugget of wisdom via a docuseries on professional basketball, things have gotten easier. Ironically, living intentionally in the present takes less energy than worrying about the multitude of things that are beyond my control.

Of course, I’m not above bitching about it. A few months ago, on a random call, that’s exactly what I did 

“Hey, smile, ok?” Adam said, when I came up for air after about an hour.

“I am!” I shot back, “you know why?”

I paused.

“Because I’m Michael Jordan,” I said.

Tokyo in a Time of Corona

“Put on a mask before you go out,” my mother insisted, “people are getting punched in the face for not wearing one.”

I paused at the front door, about to argue that punching someone in the face seemed like a good way to get a viral disease, or least a bad bacterial infection, and that in the unlikely event that an unusually aggressive Japanese person punched me, that I’d just spit in the person’s face with my mono saliva. Instead, I put on the flimsy mask that was a little too small for me, resulting in large gaps on the sides. I braced myself for the discomfort of feeling my breath condense onto my face for the next few hours.

Tokyo has been a strange place recently, made even stranger by the global panic that hadn’t seemed to affect this particularly densely populated city until approximately 48 hours ago. While entire countries went on lockdown, Japan seemed to be doing what Japan does best: pretending that what’s actually happening, isn’t. That’s not to say nothing changed: cafes and stores were emptier on weekends, my local grocery store now has a limit per person on certain products, and bakeries started to individual wrap their breads and pastries. This raised the question of how many people’s saliva I had been consuming with my chocolate croissants until this point in time.

Yet, while Covid-19 ravaged the rest of the world, Japan’s number of cases had stayed at suspiciously low numbers, most likely due to the delusionary dreams of holding the Olympics sometime in 2020. Once that dream was finally killed off by Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and the fact that large numbers of people around the world were dying, a measured panic has ensued. We have currently been advised by the mayor of Tokyo to try to stay in this weekend.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid and frustrating that the politics and projected financial loss of the Olympics has discouraged a policy of more stringent social distancing here in Japan. Even with the large number of seniors that make up the Japanese population, bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open and people commute to work in crowded trains as usual. They just have more masks on now.

It’s also scary, made more frightening by the fact that governments are not incentivized to be transparent with information about the spread of the disease. But if the grocery store shelves becoming bare the night of the mayoral weekend semi-lockdown announcement are any indication, it seems people are concerned, and that’s comforting. Because we all should be a little more worried than they tell us to be.

Working virtually means my daytime routine hasn’t changed much; but as I live with my relatively elderly parents, one which has a lung condition, I’ve stopped going to the gym and have been refraining from regular social interaction since I survived mono. A week or so ago, caving to the basic human need to interact with someone not my parents, it resulted in a fit of first-world isolation anxiety. I began to ruminate on how deep my depression could go in these Covid-19 times and preemptively panicked because there was no way calculate the time I had left until my sanity unraveled. Would it be weeks, or days? I wondered. I half-heartedly started to flip through one of the piles of used, cut-up magazines on my floor with the hope of retiring a few to the recycling bin. An image caught my eye and brought back fond memories. The background blur of an ad sparked an idea.

The thing that’s easy to forget is that isolation doesn’t put your life on hold. It doesn’t make you any less expressive or creative; instead, it provides the unexpected gift of more time. It’s a time to create, learn a new skill, take online classes, or simply find a hobby. Because based on age and pre-existing medical conditions, even if chances are you low you won’t die from Covid-19 if you go out, you might spread it, and ultimately, someone else might.

So be safe everyone, and kind, and remember to wash those hands

Mono and the Micro Penis of Popsicles

Every November, hibernation calls and I get extremely tired. My energy plummets, I can’t stay awake after lunch, and I sleep a lot.

“Where’ve you been?” A friend once asked me as I tried to keep my eyes open to type a response back.

“I think I have mono,” I said.

I later learned that it wasn’t mono, because I’ve spent the past two weeks dying from that particular viral infection. While Covid-19 started spreading across the world, I apparently had gotten the wrong virus. What seemed to start as a bad cold suddenly escalated into the sore throat from hell. I could speak but I couldn’t swallow without gathering up all my willpower and courage to face the searing pain. My doctor thought it was strep but after a throat culture was taken via much gagging, the test was negative. He gave me some fever reducers and told him to tell him how it goes.

The medication didn’t exactly work; the fever was relentless and persistent. It would seem to fade, then come back full force at night. I spent a lot of time either sweating or shivering in bed.

During hours of consciousness, between Googling mono to confirm that I was now going to live with crippling fatigue forever, I’d tell my friends via various chat platforms that yes, yes, I was fine. I questioned the veracity of those statements as I laid in bed listening to podcasts and trying not to swallow, wondering whether living off GariGariKun popsicles popsicles – “soda” flavored popsicles with a smooth exterior and a crushed-ice textured inside – can be defined as fine.

When you take the bigger pandemic into consideration, I am doing fine. I have a known, confirmed-via-blood-test virus that has some end that does not involve pneumonia and/or death. But there’s little comfort in this, because at the very least, if it doesn’t kill you, corona virus doesn’t enlarge your spleen and sideline you from physical exercise. When a slight soreness started at the bottom of the left side of my ribcage, I knew: Mono had switched my goals for the year from a bodyweight snatch to all the other nonsense that’s involved in trying not to get fat without exercise. With Covid-19, I may not have been able to breathe, but I would have been able to lift within a couple weeks.

Since the pity party I threw myself about lifting, I’ve slowly been getting better. As of writing this, the throat pain and fever are gone. I’ve graduated from subsisting off GariGariKun popsicles to Dole fruit popsicles. My lymph nodes and tonsils no longer scream and sting from the acidity of the tiny frozen fruit desserts, which I’ve begun referring to as the micropenis of popsicles. My appetite is slowly coming back but I get tired easily.

The mono is probably a blessing in disguise. I’d left my weightlifting gym at the end of January and hadn’t definitively joined another. Weightlifting plans were up in the air given the scarcity of gyms in Tokyo where you can drop weights, and the entire thing felt like another re-run of what had happened with cycling in Japan.

Except, even with all this fatigue, forced time off, and other bullshit, it feels a little more hopeful this time around. I’ll be back.

Get me to the Greek: Weighlitfting at Uesaka

A short distance from Tokyo Skytree, in a neighborhood full of manufacturers, there’s a small, fairly unremarkable factory. To the unfamiliar, it would most likely look strange and curious. To those who those who lift weights over their heads for fun, however, the facility produces the best weightlifting equipment in the world.

Uesaka is a mecca quietly churning out barbells, plates, weightlifting blocks, dumbbells, and weightlifting belts in the center of downtown Tokyo.

Earlier this month, I packed my gear and shoes and headed there, almost missing the small metal door next to the announcements of past Olympic sponsorship on the windows. I reached out a hand to knock when the door was opened by a large Greek hand. I was at Uesaka and I was there to lift with a former member of the Greek national weightlifting team.

By lucky chance, I’d virtually met Anastasios, an employee at Uesaka and a weightlifting coach at another Tokyo area CrossFit box, a couple years prior. Brought closer by our mutual love for weightlifting and intolerance for bullshit, we’d built an Internet friendship over the years with promises of meeting up peppered between discussions of dream/next tattoos and box gossip. It never quite happened until a few weeks ago, after approximately a month of dreading going to the gym and losing the confidence to lift anything over 25kg.

You know how they say knowledge is power? What they don’t tell you is that that adage is only true after you get your self-confidence crushed by said knowledge. Unfortunately, I am currently in possession of enough information to understand that my lifting form is awful. Despite constant tweaks and frustrated form practice, nothing appeared to be working. I interpreted this to mean that I would be doomed to forever lift with the kind of form that makes people visibly wince. It was completely demoralizing.

But on a custom lifting platform located in a small room off the main Uesaka factory, surrounded by custom lifting plates, I lifted for the first time this year without a knot of anxiety and fear in my chest. As I flung around the bare barbell, Anastasios made me sit down after three reps (“Sit! Rest!”) and groaned in horror when I described my squat routine which requires a total of 60 reps. We discussed our aversion to cardio, Instagram lifters, and the split jerk.

“You’re not as bad as you think,” he said after watching me fling the bar away from me during every snatch attempt.

“But, I don’t know,” I said, “maybe weightlifting…it’s just not for me. I used to be so excited about it and now I’m crying after every class.”

“You’re just in a bad situation,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the brand new Uesaka barbell in my hands, “yeah.”

After another hour of hanging out, which included a tour of the half-darkened Uesaka factory, we packed up and walked to the subway station. For once, on the walk to a subway station after a weightlifting session, I wasn’t trying to keep my shit together until I parted ways with whomever I was with so I could wallow in my self-pity. I actually felt kind of excited to learn more.

As they say, knowledge is power.

Remembering to Forget with Adam Hansen

“I don’t remember the negative parts of a relationship,” he said.

“Aren’t we supposed to remember stuff that hurts us?”

He looked at me.

“Like, for human survival?”

I searched his face for affirmation as I imagined some ancient version of him attempting to survive in the wilderness: repeatedly running through thorn bushes, trying to touch fire, getting nearly stomped to death by a mammoth. I sighed and looked at him, his face by then overtaken by a big, bright smile, apparently oblivious to the pain of past heartbreak.

Normally, I’d suggest therapy for the self-flagellation, but I suspect it’s what makes him a world-record-holding, WorldTour cyclist. I shook my head in exasperation and took another bite of one of Adam’s sweet potato wedges: crispy sheaths of gooey potato served with a generous sprinkle of lavender salt. It was June and we were at Elle Café, where there is an entire page of vegan nibbles, snacking on those fries before diving into tall glasses full of mango and melon and soy whipped cream. We’d just finished off bowls of vegan ramen at Afuri.

To be fair, Adam suffers from the kind of generosity and masochism that has lost wars. It’s most likely benefited him as a super domestique but has also meant that he has remained – certainly to his detriment – a close friend throughout my multiple meltdowns. His phone has been the recipient of all of my life dramas: family feuds, heartbreak, underemployment. Over the years, I’ve sent book-length emails weeping over people I’d largely forget by the time I saw Adam next, been the sole member of the entourage who tags along to professional engagements as if I belong there, and once got so mad I called him a shithead. He still messages me to tell me he’s in town, makes time to catch up in person, and passes on all the pro peloton gossip.

It’s conduct worthy of a Purple Heart – or whatever the Australian equivalent is (a lifetime supply of ANZAC cookies?) – and was most recently repeated a few weeks ago. He was in town for work related to Leomo; I was nursing the sting of a failed non-relationship. The timing, for me, was perfect.

Over almost-scone-like vegan pancakes at Ain Soph. Ginza, vegan burgers and tiramisu at Ain Soph Ripple, and cups of coffee consumed around the city, Adam told me about the usual: plans for next season and overextending himself by taking on way too much in his brief off-season. In return, I related my most recent misadventures as a super domestique of life: bending over backwards to try to make relationships work and the unfortunate realization of being the only person doing CPR on dying conversations on Tinder.

It’s not like life couldn’t be worse; I can think of several ways, off the top of my head, how it could be. But it’s not exactly made better by my tendency to bring a deliberately honed capacity to endure pain and bullshit for extended periods of time from a sport I used to love into every other area of my life. Unfortunately, I have discovered that there is no tangible reward or cardiovascular benefit to blowing myself up for someone else, lending a wheel when I don’t have to, and falling on swords. It’s actually just exhausting.

“Adam,” I’d said over those pancakes, “I’m tired.”

As the only cyclist to have completed 20 Grand Tours in a row, and one prone to play domestique on and off the bike, I’ve often asked Adam’s phone how he keeps going. He’s never really given a clear answer other than vague encouragement to be more positive. This doesn’t answer my question, I’d thought, but assumed that it was due to some misunderstanding, on his end, of course, from spending too much time in an eastern European country where the English language is apparently scarce.

It never dawned on me that he simply forgot about all the bad stuff. When he divulged this information to me back in June, I was appalled and concerned. Voluntary, selective memory loss seems like a terrible way to avoid future hurt and heartbreak. In fact, that is absolutely the kind of altruism that has led to my texting exes and watching my emotional well-being burn to the ground with the match in my hand.

In the intervening months, I’ve realized that what Adam was referring to wasn’t the stupidity to repeat past mistakes but rather the indefatigable conviction that someone else’s emotional turmoil – and the pain that may have caused him – weren’t going to affect his future choices. It’s a weird yet refreshing optimism that can be misconstrued as naïve or foolish, but in practice requires the healthy ability to remain open and vulnerable no matter how bad the prognosis for lasting love may be.

“So how do you not go back to some awful ex?” I’d asked, just as food was served and our conversation moved on to more important things like vegan omelets. I answered my own question later on, when Adam pressed me to message a super cute Australian guy who had started following me a few months prior.  

“He looks like he’s in his mid-twenties,” I’d said.

“Just message him,” Adam had said, “I dated a girl who was ten years younger than me once.”

“Yeah,” I’d said, “and if you forgot what that was like, let me remind you because I remember.”

He laughed a little and I rolled my eyes again. But I suppose that’s the secret: to choose friends who will remember your heartbreak so you don’t have to, and to hope that when the time comes, they’ll keep you from running into thorn bushes, touching fire, or torching yourself with an ex.