Notes from my trip to the 10th Circle of Hell
On paralysis and perfectionism
It’s odd that I haven’t yet written about the time I woke up and the right side of my face was completely paralysed. I guess I thought everybody knows how the story goes. Someone experiences a health scare followed by a profound epiphany that changes their life completely. The end. Although with all I thought I knew, I didn’t anticipate my particular epiphany would involve this much drooling. So here it goes.
Three years ago, I woke up and my right eyelid felt strangely awake. It appeared that over night I had completely lost the ability to move it shut. Upon attempting to proceed with my morning as usual, it became apparent that this new immobility afflicted the entire right side of my face. Until then, I had gone through life as a staunch hypochondriac alert to the most minute irregularities in my physical condition. The only way I can explain my unfazedness that morning is that I must have been in complete denial that what I had most feared in life – getting befallen with some mystery disease - was actually happening to me.
It was when I almost bit off my semi-paralysed tongue at breakfast that I decided it was time to call a doctor. I was surprised to hear that the GP wanted to see me immediately. Not that you’d have been able to tell because my new affliction had frozen my facial expression to eternally hover somewhere between slightly quizzical and mildly horrified.
The diagnosis was clear – Bell’s Palsy – an inflammation of the facial nerve. It can hit anyone who’s ever had any viral infection in their lives. With the reason for afflicting some and not others being sheer bad luck, it’s completely beyond preventative measures and a nightmare for any control freak. 85% of patients recover fully after 2 weeks if put on a course of heavy steroids. So I was sent home with a bag of drugs and the helpful advice not to think about the other 15%, while staring at the ceiling with my unflinching eye.
There were various moments, especially at night, when the drugs made me convinced, that I was having a heart attack / brain haemorrhage (pick your flavour) and would die imminently. But as you can conclude from these lines, they all proved to be unfounded.
The longest lasting pain actually came from realising how much time I had wasted on thoughts of constant self-improvement. If only I was a bit prettier, a bit thinner, a bit richer, a bit further travelled, a bit more educated – then I’d be happy.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón has written a short story that perfectly encapsulates my agony. He draws on Dante’s depiction of hell as 9 circles, each holding bespoke forms of torment for different types of sinners. In Zafón’s story, a fallen angel accompanies a time-starved city dweller on his descent to the 10th circle of hell. When asked about this post-Dantean addition, the angel explains: We had to add another circle, for all those who go through life as if it was going to last forever. I didn’t have to die to go to the 10th circle, I was in it! Of all the agonies described in Dante’s Inferno, I find it hard to imagine one that is worse than the gut-wrenching, chest-tightening, scratching-at-the-walls feeling of regret upon realising that I had been criticising what I had had when I should’ve been celebrating life.
Of course, in the Hollywood version of this story I regain mobility in my face, change my life from one day to the other and become a best-selling author commercialising my pain in an autobiographic self-help tome entitled ‘From Paralysed to Paradise – How I got the life you all want’. But we are stuck in the cheaper parts of Haringey, North London. Regaining mobility in my face concluded with a deadpan NHS neurologist telling me that my face looked ‘quite well’, when I thought I had fully recovered, and the realisation that I don’t need to achieve anything at all because I’m already everything I bloody have to be.
In a world of ever-looming death, the only thing we have is now: the breath I take now, the sky I’m under now, the people I am with now. I might as well show up for it fully. Zooming into the moment I am in rather than thinking three goalposts ahead. Anything else I get to do is icing. And the anything else is so much more fun freed from the expectations of my future-focused self.
You might rightly be concerned that the biggest death threat given this new attitude of mine comes from people who feel the urge to club down the most obnoxious person in the room. But even as I picture hateful crowds moving in on me, all I wish for is that they too get their very own near-death experience. That they get a visceral sense that a million things could happen any moment, that could forever alter or end their lives – and what an amazing bullshit filter that is.
Of course, there are moments when my new Zen shell cracks to reveal that the always-struggling-for-more anxiety is still lurking inside of me. When my girlfriends’ conversations turn to everything on their pre-30 bucket list, when dinner chat revolves never-endingly around mortgages, and when everything colleagues can talk about is the next round of promotions. But now I do have rare moments when instead of joining in the fretting, I remember the 10th Circle of Hell and I just breathe and blink - with both eyes.