The self improvement obsession / the working world's fatal flaw (3.7.23)

(TW: medical jargon, mention of blood, needles, illness, fainting)

It only seems fitting that I start writing this in a red padded recovery chair at the ER, sodium chloride dripping through a needle in my left arm, the feeling of sleep waning and waxing in a fog of my percocet coated consciousness, waiting for the sign that the four vials of blood they retrieved an hour earlier did not indicate a terrifying immediate problem. The woman to my right has had a miscarriage, and the woman to my left coughs for breath from an asthma attack while her child begs for more hospital snacks.

It all started with strep throat last week, which is more a nuisance than anything. It makes it hard to breathe and incredibly painful to swallow, and might give you body aches and a fever. I've had it twice before in my life, so I was familiar. While on amoxicillin for treatment, I started getting flat pink-red spots all over my body. It looked like if hives didn't raise up, and chicken pox didn't blare deep red. My partner had had the same thing a couple months ago, and it scared me once it started crawling up his face. Seeing it on me, however, I shrugged. I anticipated it would go away. I have always had sensitive skin, after all. I had developed some sort of viral cold, too, since my throat had gone dry again and I had to blow my nose every five minutes. Again, a nuisance more than anything. I figured I would rest up one day and be back on my feet the next.

I woke up Friday morning around 4:30am to a severe radiating pain in my lower abdomen. I wanted to make sure my brain wasn't just psyching me out, since I am already two days on my menstrual cycle. That is, until I took two Advil, forced myself to eat a miniscule snack to mitigate the rawness of an empty stomach. Instead of feeling better, I feel myself suddenly getting clammy and light headed – the vasovagal reaction that I have in response to severe pain and anxiety. The panic sets in. My blood pressure drops immediately, and as I drop down to the floor with my vision starting to grow spotty, my only thought is to keep my head below my heart and try to breathe. Then comes the nausea – I run to the bathroom with my upper body collapsed and red spots still swarming my vision. My body expunges itself in every way possible. I keep telling myself to breathe, but the cold sweat is still on my skin and I physically cannot stand up without blacking out.

The pain seems to be getting worse. The Advil isn't working after 45 minutes, and on a nearly empty stomach, it should. I wonder if I need to call an ambulance, but I know I can't afford it, and I don't want to seem weak. The sun starts creeping up as I find myself in child's pose, my blood pressure starting to return to normal after 30 minutes in the bathroom. I'm not sure why because the pain is still relentless – sometimes my vasovagal reaction is more of my body's alert system to a new, scary stimulus. I used to pride myself on being someone who has never been to the ER or taken an ambulance, eating healthy, exercising, and generally not getting very sick. But experiencing this, I realize it is not only ableist but truly a bizarre thing to be prideful of. Illness is not a sign of personal perseverance, or lack thereof – especially when stripped down to questioning the reliability of your basic living functions.

I get to the ER by Uber and the whole time my pain is so severe, every stop light is excruciating. I'm doubled over in pain every minute as an intense pain waves come and go. Waiting for the ER doctor, I can't help but try every weird solution to try to make it go away, go faster, distract from time, anything to stop being encapsulated by this radiating pain. I press the clerk about how soon the doctor will be coming. I see a group of nurses sitting in chairs by the other ER beds and I want to scream at them to help me. The flourescent lights feel like they're mocking me. I don't want to pass out again. The nurse checking me in to do my vitals asks me to describe my pain level on a scale of 1-10, and I don't hesitate to say this is a 9 – assuming 10 would make me fully black out on the cold hospital tile floor.

Fast forward another hour and a half. The ER doctor says I may have endometriosis – a type of gynecological condition with no known cause. The irony is that I just got asked to do a recording and performance related to endometriosis awareness, and I had mentioned that I related to it for always having some sort of “unknown severe menstrual pain” throughout my life.

The funny (or not so funny part) is that I had always wondered if I had the condition, and I had also always attempted to sublimate it. It seemed that every woman I knew was able to go about their daily lives with their periods and it was never a big deal. I was determined to be the same. I figured that my pain was just something I would have to learn to grin and bear with the right arsenal of pain medication, heating pads, and breathwork. It had been my routine since I was 14, mere months after I got my very first period. I remember calling out of school and driving lessons from that pain. I would manage by always taking two extra strength Tylenol, around the clock, every 4-6 hours, soon as that excruciating pain would set in.

I have also always developed a mild feeling of panic when I calculate that my period will come on a recording date or a performance date because I know it will be distracting and I don't want it to interfere with my work. I remember being at the SWR New Jazz Meeting in Germany in 2021, laying down on the daybed during lunch break, waiting for my menstrual pain to pass and feeling incredibly embarrassed explaining to my German supervisor why exactly I was in pain. And my pain had a time limit – in an hour, we had to be back in the studio, working on compositions for the next four to five hours. And I had to be fine. I would cost myself – and my bandmates – their pay, if I wasn't.

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My first instinct surrounding the realization that I had now spent several days in bed with various illnesses was that I was angry I could not be working on my new songs I was planning to bring to my bandleader shows over the next couple of months, or that I could not record the new electronic stuff I had been working out the last couple of weeks since I felt that my music content had been leaning too acoustic for my liking these days. I was mad I could not go to the DMV finally to see if I could drive my car again after nearly a year of it being out of service from an insurance mistake and a hit and run accident. The worries, the deeds that push me to be a better musician, the “put together” person that my friends and family know me as, the everyday enforcements I make, all suspended and piling up further due to sickness, made me deeply unsettled. I thought having struggles with mental illness was enough of chronic day-to-day intervention for one lifetime. Even with that, I had always relied on my personal ability – and society's expectation - of me to bounce back in 1-3 business days. This wasn't even the horror of something more serious like living with cancer or recovering from a brain injury. But the pain was undeniable, it was recurring, it was disruptive, and up until now, I was determined to pretend it never happened at all right up until it came again the next month.

To the outside, whether it be my live audience, my social media audience, or my critics and spectators, taking time away from practice or duties to take care of oneself in any form appears like I simply didn't work hard enough. Instead of feeling good that I'm taking care of myself and healing, I feel guilty and ashamed. When I think about how much mental health in particular used to interfere with my ability to be a diligent musician at the time, I don't think about how I was strong enough to learn how to manage it after seven or eight years as much as I think I could be a better musician if I had all that time back. As if there was a way that I could. As if it will not make me the unique musician that I will become – that I am becoming – equipped with a story of overcoming that stands alone like a fingerprint. It's sad. How did we get to be this way?

I remember all the teachers that would come in to my high school for masterclasses and boast about practicing for 12 hours a day in college. It seems in the jazz world, folks are so preoccupied with how “hard” you work. And by hard, we mean the strictly musical work – transcriptions, rudiments, learning songs, patterns, figures, transpositions, chord changes, etudes, sonatas, and the like. This is what I understood as rewarded behavior in the music world. You would be rewarded with gigs, money, public attention, and possibly the most important – respect from peers and critics. Furthermore, you must always be striving to be better. There is no room for suffering, and god forbid you harp on suffering, mourning, or letting emotion wash through you as it does. It is the self improvement catch 22. It communicates that you should self improve, but only in a certain kind of way. The way that reaps an immediately redeemable reward, and particularly, one for the ego – not necessarily for the health and soul.

There is no reward for how hard you work at your marriage, how hard you battle a disease silently, how well you hide your physical pain, a loss of a loved one or family member. There is no reward for going to therapy, for putting in the time for mental work that could be the difference between life and death, for putting in extra hours to provide money to support your family. When I say there is no reward, I mean there is no reward from the outside world. Nobody will treat you more nicely for going through what you've been through. Most of them will never even know it has happened to you. They only see what you produce. They only see what you make of it. It's an upsetting truth, but understanding it will help us get to a better place within ourselves and with each other.

The reward you get is from within you, and it is so hard to give oneself that because it doesn't immediately stroke your ego. Sometimes the reward is just survival within your own hidden inner being. It doesn't present itself like self-improvement, albeit maybe over a large amount of time - it presents itself like the opposite. We take time away from the public. We don't go on tour when our fans ask us to. Our next album comes a couple years later than anticipated. I've experienced some of my peers who have done this and folks wondering “whatever happened to them”, and it makes me sad that if someone isn't abiding by this constant outward presentation of self improvement, they might be inferior or weren't “strong enough to handle it”, even if they take that time away precisely in order to be strong enough in the future. The illusion of this finite time to self improve shatters in the hands of our own whirlwind of life, and that's the point that everybody seems to be in denial of. And I think we could all benefit from our human flawedness, from a little more sympathy, from a little more love or intention behind the critiques we introduce.

Nobody is immune to suffering, either. That's a myth. It can creep on slowly, building, coming, going over time, or it can undermine us at the stroke of a pen and destabilize everything we think we can rely on. Whether one person wins the “suffering olympics” or not is beside the point that pain is real and present in everyone to some degree. Would it hurt us to acknowledge that it's hard instead of trying to block it out all the time or pretend it doesn't exist? Maybe then, we would find a way to heal that actually works in the long run – even if not all the way.

One of my favorite TV shows is Better Things on Hulu, largely because of the honest brilliance of Pamela Adlon's character Sam - a working actor and single mom of three girls. She consoles a fellow mom who is Mormon, someone who initially judges her for letting her eldest daughter bear her belly button in church and her youngest laugh at the “insane” teachings of the Mormon church. The Mormon mom breaks down after Sam criticizes her for judging her daughter when she is forcing Mormon beliefs on her young daughter. The mom admits that her marriage is a disaster, and getting divorced is frowned upon in Mormonism even though they openly contribute to infidelity after trying so hard to make it work. “I don't know how to do it anymore”, she cries as she breaks down.

Sam says something along the lines of “well, none of us do. I definitely don't. We all just get up, go on, and...do our best.”