When I was younger, I assiduously avoided painkillers. I remember late one night, unable to sleep because of my period cramps, doing yoga and breathing exercises while my mom asked me why I wouldn’t just take an ibuprofen. I thought it was important to be in touch with your pain, that using painkillers to simply avoid it would be cheating somehow.
I also loved sad books and movies; I would reread Gone with the Wind until I started crying, reveling in the painful and beautiful feelings that filled me. My mom would refuse to watch movies that seemed as if they would be sad, or where she had heard that the mother died, or the father, or the dog. Her favorite movies were lighthearted comedies. She read no novels at all; her reading tastes tended toward histories of salt or the shipping container. I thought this was all very sad. Reading novels had been my main exposure to the spectrum of human emotion and experience so far. How could you go without that?
I don’t know exactly when this changed. At some point I tried an ibuprofen and found that hey, it worked pretty well. Somewhere along the line I became the girl who always has some on hand when her friends ask and is happy to tell you that things like maximum dosages and warnings against taking it with alcohol are really more like guidelines.
Yesterday I was reading a book–a good book, one of which teenage me would have approved–and the feelings, about love and humanity and the terrifying vastness of the universe, got stronger and stronger until I wondered, “why am I doing this again?” I flipped to a terrible YA novel instead.
After dinner, my sister asked me what I wanted to watch. “Something bad,” I replied. She found a British rom com on Netflix with a three star rating, and we happily made fun of the dialogue and characters and general implausibility of the scenario. I couldn’t have cared less about the fate of any of the characters. Watching it induced a pleasantly numb feeling, not unlike the sensation of the menthol cough drops I was taking for my sore throat.
The previous night, my cough had kept me awake, staring at the ceiling. So I took a dose of NyQuil before bed and slept soundly. I didn’t dream.
I don’t know what teenage me would think if she saw me now. I don’t know how I could explain my choices to her. I imagine staring at my shoes, guiltily, before offering a half-hearted justification.
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”