the second time around

Back in the fall, in biochemistry, we learned about Lesch-Nyhan disease. People with Lesch-Nyhan are deficient in an enzyme called HGPRT involved in purine salvage, which leads to uric acid buildup. I remember these details because the other thing about people with Lesch-Nyhan is that they for some reason also mutilate themselves. They bite their own lips and fingers. Completely helpless to stop themselves, people with this disease often bandage their hands to prevent inflicting hurt upon themselves. Our professor referred us to a New Yorker article about a man with Lesch-Nyhan, and how the lack of control in self-mutilation pervades his entire approach to life. Instead of telling someone he loves them, he swears at them. Seeing a sharp pencil induces an uncontrollable urge to take it and do harm. He uses his right hand to grab and restrain his left hand from grabbing a knife and hurting himself or someone else. His intentions and his actions are completely at odds, and they divide his body.

The author of the article framed the disease as the extreme end of a phenomenon of which we are all victim, what Edgar Allen Poe termed "the imp of the perverse." The idea that we all do things that we know are bad for ourselves, like eating too much junk food to the point it's not pleasurable anymore or contemplating swerving your car into oncoming traffic for no particular reason. I remember first learning about this strange, rare disease and thinking that I must have some emotional form of Lesch-Nyhan, where I perpetuate things that I know, in mind and in heart, are not good for me and will hurt me.

Doing it once made me none the wiser the second time around. In a recent lecture about the biological basis of pain, we learned that when you feel a certain kind of pain for the second time, you feel it more acutely because you know its character. I'm not sure about the implications about your recovery and resilience, because I would guess there is also a desensitization process, the idea that pain makes you stronger and more able the next time. But what was clear is that once you get to know pain through first encounter, you are more aware when it hits you again. You don't have to feel around in the dark to learn its edges and figure out how to hold it. You know its contours without exploration.

The professor who lectured on pain did make a mistake, though, when he alluded to Lesch-Nyhan and said that people with the disease don't feel pain when they self-mutilate. I distinctly remember that they do feel pain, but the awareness of it can't stop them from hurting themselves. For them there is no desensitization or increased strength, only a constant fight against recurring pain. But I admired the man in the article, because there was a deliberate fight, a will against what he did to himself even if he knew it would continue.

For all the mistakes that I make twice and three times, growth does lurk in the corners. Despite similar themes, and a similar trajectory of trying not to hurt anyone and in the process hurting everyone including myself--there are different circumstances, reasons, people, feelings, and most importantly, more things learned. It does make me wonder again if I'll ever feel the same as I did the first time around. That used to worry me, but now I know that each thing offers something else, and it's valuable. And if I experience that feeling again, it will still have newness and surprises and a sense of other. It makes me think that for the man with Lesch-Nyhan, each finger bitten is not quite the same, and that even though you know the shape of its pain, you still reach out to find something different.

When I told Guson I was going home before summer because I missed my parents, he said I was maturing. My immediate reaction was to reject that idea, because isn't growing up about not missing home, not needing your parents? But it turns out he was right. There's only been one other time when I made sudden plans to go home. That time was a result of wanting to be away from where I was, a push from there to home. This time, I don't feel a push away from anything--I absolutely love where I am, in all senses--instead, it's a pull from home. That time I felt a little weak and this time I feel stronger. This time around, it's different.

loss

To borrow a sentiment from Steph's blog...God, it fucking hurts again.

*

A couple of weeks ago a graduating medical student was killed by a car outside of our dorm building, at an intersection we've all crossed hundreds of times. She walked along a red light, following a truck that was doing the same, and the car going green didn't see her. I was struck ajar at how much it affected me, the people around me, and the Yale community as a whole. There are many factors, I think--her youth, an emanating sweetness that seemed to touch those to whom she was unknown, proximity and inclusiveness. I don't really have anything new or insightful to say about the tragedy, neither its obvious immensity nor its subtleties. I'm sorry for that, but I'm glad there are many people who will do her memory full justice.

A few days after it happened, I read a short story called Found Objects about a woman who compulsively stole personal items. She didn't steal from stores, just people. She didn't steal for monetary or other gain; she didn't use any of the items she took. She piled them onto a table in her home, separate from all else in her life. She took a screwdriver from the back pocket of a plumber, a wallet left by a woman in the bathroom, bath salts from her best friend. The climax of the story was when she rummaged through the wallet of a one-night-stand and found a scrap of paper, saved through time and place, on it scrawled: I believe in you. She took it and never returned it. You could tell she hated herself for it. And you could tell she didn't know how else to be. It wasn't about the addictive thrill of getting away with the crime. It was about collecting pieces of people, and hurting them and hurting because of it.

It caught my eye in the New Yorker while I was in the waiting room at the pharmacy, because the title made me think of a short column I read once in the magazine about a person who collected people's lost gloves, storing them away in the hopes that someday one would find its other half. Found Objects turned out to have a very different theme, and it wasn't so much about things being found as being lost.

On the same day that we mourned the world losing Mila, I lost something separate and large in my life. It felt selfish, yet fitting at the same time, to be consumed by this multifaceted pain. What I lost, I lost because I was a little stupid, a little careless and not brave enough. Natural things that afflict most, and things sewn into all of us, and things grown out of circumstances and other people's mistakes too. So I'm learning to not place too much blame on myself but that doesn't decrease responsibility or the quite awful realization of your own capacity to cause pain.

I felt a bit like the woman who steals, and it makes me think of the driver of the car in Mila's accident. Granted that no one will ever suffer like those close to her--but the driver must suffer too, knowing what his mistake (and it was no one's clear or full fault) did to a life and having to live with that always. I feel a sort of immense sorrow for him, and I worry this is a little unfair and not right, but it seems to me that pain can't be too relative. It hurts very much to be hurt, and it hurts very much to inflict the hurt upon someone else. The driver on Frontage Street, the woman in Found Objects, and me, different beads on the same string.

Nowadays when I see people crossing that intersection against traffic when the light's red, I get a little sad because they don't know any better. And nowadays, when I do the same, I get a little sad because I do.