While sick and unable to eat, I became addicted to baking shows. I’d never watched them before, but now I craved the soothing British accents of The Great British Bake Off. I started to genuinely worry about whether a contestant would be able to bring out the taste of grapefruit in a sponge cake, had waking dreams about layers of dough and butter. I squinted through blurring eyes at recipes for galettes and biscuits and made my dad buy me a springform pan to make cheesecake, which I hoped would be creamy enough to eat during my recovery. But the day he brought the pan home, I still couldn’t swallow water without trouble. Yogurt and applesauce were too viscous; they sucked at my open wounds. Instead, I sipped at diluted baby food, blotting my lips between each swallow. We kept meticulous records of each bite, and I cheated by rounding calories up by five here and there. On the worst days, it took me up to two hours to manage two hundred calories of a chocolate weight gain drink marketed to the elderly.
Time, as a dimension of life, no longer seemed applicable. It was replaced by pain.
As a small child, I got the chicken pox twice. I caught scarlet fever at eight, was hospitalized with a kidney infection at ten, had the first of several chronic kidney stone episodes at seventeen. In middle school, when my sprained ankle was healing too quickly and I faced the threat of rejoining a softball unit in gym, I placed my leg in a door frame and slammed the door without hesitation. In high school, I cut myself almost every day. I did ballet for fifteen years, so there was a time in which I was used to pulling off pointe shoes and finding my tights bright with blood.
What I mean to say is, I am not unfamiliar with pain. But before SJS, I had never developed a long-term relationship with suffering—had never gone days and weeks at a stretch without a moment of true relief, without being able to honestly say, “nothing hurts.”
What does pain teach you, I kept wondering, and what does silence?
Even if I managed to regrow my mouth, I didn’t know what I would sound like. I took speech therapy in elementary school, but never managed to sharpen my S’s to a proper hiss; as an adult, I still have a slight lisp and avoid words with S. But I have always taken it for granted that when I talk, someone will understand. That it will be only a moment’s effort to shape a sentence and that my tongue will deliver the words in my head.
Now, unable to speak, I wondered if my silence meant less because it wasn’t voluntary—if those who learned from vows of silence did so because they chose it. Or if I was just too ignorant, or too early on in my experience, to find the lessons—if someone else in my place might be well on their way toward some higher self-awareness. I was fuzzy on the specifics, but I knew that plenty of martyrs and learned people throughout the ages described finding wisdom in suffering. I vaguely believed that enduring pain could build character and bring revelations, or at least teach humility and patience. And because crying or moaning only burned my eyes or hurt my throat, I tried to suffer in complete silence. I tried to meditate, to breathe into the pain. I told myself that SJS was adding new depths to my experience of life, making me a more compassionate person, helping me appreciate who and what really mattered.
Mostly, though, I just tried not to cry. I spent hours just focusing on staying as still as possible, on not disturbing my own body, let alone the universe.