I rant quite a lot about stuff and situations I find untenable. But I have an unusually high threshold for some things—nasty and nauseating, distasteful and discomfiting.
Ten minutes into my monthly pharmacy run, my father’s prescriptions alone running at least four pages long, I suddenly feel my stomach churning. It must be the chocolate-covered biscuits I had with my coffee this morning.
Why do I still eat milk chocolate even though I’m lactose-intolerant?
I guess I’m a sucker for love.
I know the pharmacy has a restroom though it’s off-limits to customers. Some years back, I saw an elderly man ushered in. But I’m thinking—in my athleisure, I don’t exactly look geriatric and in desperate need of assistance. Though, truth be told, I was getting a little bit desperate by the second.
As I vacillate in growing agony on whether I should beg them to let me use their restroom or simply step out and take my chances elsewhere, I am seized by this mad and masochistic idea to just wait it out.
I can do this, I tell myself. I’ve held pee for three hours on a road trip in South America. I, of course, withhold this shameful piece of information when quizzed by doctors about my UTIs. If I can hold pee, I can hold poop. It’s not the first time. Mind over matter.
I tore my mind to shreds every ten minutes—should I hold on or should I give in? The next hour proved to be more agonizing than I had imagined. But in the end, I did it. Mind over matter.
I wish I could tell you that was the one and only time when I was a sucker for love.
But I’ve shamelessly done it everywhere and all over the world—in the fields, behind a tree, by the river, in the mountains, in front of a giraffe, by the carcass of a jackal, and even in the midst of people—in a communal latrine in a country I’d rather not name. Mind over matter.
Suffering through chronic migraines in the past, I’ve powered through multiple days of debilitating pain—working, writing, even socializing when my skull felt like it was threaded with skewers. Mind over matter.
When I first ran, I couldn’t run even ten minutes. But I realized over time that often, when my body felt like it couldn’t go another kilometer, when my mind took over, it could go another five. My longest run to date has been a little over two hours. Mind over matter.
And yet, for all that my body can hold—pee, poop and more. For all that it can bear—hunger, fatigue, heat, pain, cold, bad food, low levels of oxygen at 13,435 feet above sea level, for some strange reason, it can’t stand young minds with brain fog.
I have no patience for those who don’t pay attention, who can’t follow instructions, who give answers unrelated to the questions, who send twenty messages when two will suffice. Mind over matter.
I, somehow, can’t do this one.