The best way to describe being electrocuted is that it feels exactly like it looks in cartoons: your hand touches something and the shock travels through you, lighting up your skeleton until it feels like a glowing thing. Also, it hurts. The hurt isn’t just instantaneous; it lasts for several minutes as your body fights to return to stasis. When I was electrocuted the other week, the skin on my arm turned a mottled red, itching and buzzing. Whatever was in there had been stirred up, like swirling a stick around the bottom of a pond.
I hadn’t expected to electrocute myself. Most people, I imagine, don’t. I’d just changed a bulb in my kitchen, which had gone fine; I’d swapped the bulbs, thrown out the dead one, and was returning the cardboard box of spare lightbulbs to the cabinet. Then my hand touched the side of the box where I can only assume the metal end of one of the bulbs had come to rest.
I yelled — so loud that my upstairs neighbor texted to see if I was okay (no) — and fell backwards off the step stool. For a few seconds, I couldn’t see. My right side felt like it was on fire. I backed out of the scene and went to lie down on my living room rug. I jiggled my arm and leg, alarmed by the discoloration.
The worst part was not knowing why the shock had happened. You expect this kind of thing while you’re changing a bulb, not after the fact. For a moment I was afraid to touch anything else — afraid the charge was still in me, ready to detonate again if I brushed against the wrong thing.
Because that, I decided, was what had happened. Changing the bulb (without turning off the light switch) must have electrified me somehow. The first thing I touched afterward, even through cardboard, happened to be the metal end of a fresh lightbulb, which sent the charge racing through me. It seemed ridiculous, but a friend who went to “science high school” eventually confirmed that, in addition to being its own water-based conductor, the body can hold a charge.
The body has always been able to do incredible, ridiculous, unlikely things. Mine somehow survived 15 years as a dancer, 7 of those years in pointe shoes, which usually leave the feet gnarled and knobby (mine are still adorable, thanks for asking). But lately I’ve wondered if our bodies are hitting an inflection point. The weekend after I electrocuted myself, three of five members of my most active group chat spent all of Sunday in bed. One was recovering from travel, another from an overbooked week, another from a cold. Some of us texted through it, sending pillow selfies. Some of us went quiet.
More recently, people I’ve known have come down with the flu, nasty colds, COVID (again, of course, always), an intestinal parasite. There’s some evidence that contracting COVID changes the way the body fights infections, triggering white blood cells to produce more inflammatory signals than they would otherwise. A more quotidian theory is that our immune systems are weaker for having spent a good year or two indoors with limited exposure to germs, and therefore fewer defenses from them.
This past summer I got mono for the third time in my life. Apparently the Epstein-Barr virus (the virus that causes mononucleosis) interacts with COVID in ways we’re just beginning to understand, none of which are good. After a few weeks lying low, I thought I was fit to rejoin society. I was wrong. I went to a yoga class and couldn’t make it all the way through. I went to another yoga class and caught a cold the day after that flattened me for a week. I wasn’t listening to myself, my new doctor later told me.
I was silencing my body in other ways, too. Often, I wouldn’t eat until I felt like I was about to pass out. Even then, I would deprive myself in certain ways: only open-faced sandwiches, only greens and protein for dinner. I would wait to pee until I was desperate, then run to the bathroom like I’d only just thought about it. Which, in a way, was true. I was ignoring the signals that were supposed to keep me alive, treating them like a distraction or an inconvenience rather than an imperative. Repairing the disconnect between my body and my mind, my new doctor said, was the only thing that would help me get holistically better.
Still, some things aren’t explained by either my new doctor or germ theory. I see more posts than ever about burnout, about logging off. A recent article in “Self” titled “How to Feel ‘Good Tired’ Instead of Just…Depleted” starts like this:
Everything feels exhausting lately. Maybe it always has; lately is, of course, a subset of always. There’s just so much to do every day, and boundless opportunity, thanks to the constant stream of information at our fingertips, to consider the ways in which we’re falling short.
This resonated. I read the rest of the piece hoping it would tell me how to not feel so tired all the time. Instead, the writer’s solution was to do things that feel spiritually fulfilling so that, when you end each day exhausted, at least you know it was for a good cause. Thanks? I guess?
The other thing I wanted to know that the article didn’t quite answer was why we, as a collective, feel so tired lately, in this “subset of always.” Why everyone around me seems to be discovering the beauty — even the necessity — of spending an entire day in bed. Why we’re all being forced to ration our energy in ways we didn’t have to before. Why this past year felt like a slog through thigh-deep mud. Why our bodies have seemingly, collectively, hit a wall.
It could be that we’re all getting older and being forced to confront our physical limitations for the first time. It could be that we’re just paying closer attention. It could be that new things are emerging to exhaust us at an unprecedented pace: new COVID variants, a soulless mayor, a genocide in Gaza so vast and horrific in scope that we have rarely seen its historic equal, funded by our tax dollars. We’re witnessing this genocide primarily through social media, a lens that asks us to digest what we are seeing in a way that only offers space for sympathy, not resolve to upend the state. How exhausting, that dissonance. How difficult to hold in the body. Once you’ve been electrified, the charge has to go somewhere.
To be fair, I was putting a lot on the author of the “Self” article. I don’t know the answers either. I suspect — and the existence of the article validates the idea — that something is happening! That the way we relate to our bodies has changed. That new things make us tired, that we need equal and opposite forces to feel energized, even whole. If you figure out what they are, let me know.
Catch a feel
The Year in ‘Sensitive Content’ by Amanda Hess, The New York Times
The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap by Andrea Long Chu, New York magazine
C’est la Vie!: A French Cancer Diary by Lisa Carver, The Paris Review