How to Be Well
and the pull of extremes
I’d forgotten Covid, but Covid always feels like Covid—the throat ache, the exhaustion, the chemical throbbing along every nerve. Exiled to my Sanatorium (a dorm room at Trinity College in Dublin, where I was teaching for two weeks), I was suffering hard. I thrashed my sheets into tangles. Every shower required Herculean effort. Hell on top of hell, I got my period. I have to respect any force—illness, grief, whatever—that razes me to the ground like that, reminds me of the tenuousness of feeling good.
On the other side, ecstasy: Released from quarantine, every face-to-face conversation made me high. The earth looked sharp and vibrant, as if the virus had left me with contact lenses. Each Guinness was so delicious, I would have moaned were I not in a pub. As a group, we rode a bus to Glendalough, Saint Kevin’s sixth-century monastic settlement, where the natural beauty choked me up.
When the teaching stint ended, Alison and I rented a car to go to Sligo in western Ireland. Alison had also had Covid. In fact, the whole faculty had had Covid at once. Everyone’s talking about how weak the new strains are and I am here to tell you: Bullshit.
Anyway.
I don’t know why everyone swarms touristy Galway when they could hang out on the coast in Sligo—basically a remote planet with a knockout water supply, so green, it made me squint. The county is known for nutrient-rich seaweed that solves all problems. I wonder if every place has a resource that solves all problems. In the U.S., I guess it’s Tylenol?
From the passenger seat one day, thinking of Saint Kevin who, so the legend goes, rolled in nettles to restrain himself from having sex, I told Alison, “What interests me about the monastic life—” She was simultaneously driving on the left side of the road, using her left hand to operate a stick shift, and holding a conversation. I was in awe.
“You’re interested in the monastic life?” Naturally, she sounded puzzled.
I worry that there’s something about freelancing, about all the traveling, that has me tubing gently down the river, never bothering to resist the current. Freelancing ushers in challenges, of course, but I can wear my bathrobe into the afternoon if I want to, skip a day or a week if I want to. Monasticism is the opposite of how I live and opposites seduce me. I admire those who live deliberately, who self-impose unpleasant structure—the Saint Kevins of the world and the people who meal-prep and the people who meditate under a tree until they die at 130.
In my 20s, fueled by the prospect of self-improvement, of a permanent wellness, I was always quitting something: Sugar. Coffee. A man. I would go vegan. I would embark on a daily hot yoga practice. I would move to Wyoming. California. New York. Everything was deliberate. Everything was full-throttle. Extreme change was my drug. Moderation was for the weak. I believed that some 2.0 iteration of me was just around the bend, that I was one deprivation or major shakeup away from banishing all physical and psychological ills. Even now, I’m gripped by the fantasy that living deliberately is the answer, the Tao, the seaweed of County Sligo. I’m always thinking I should return to self-improvement. I’m always thinking that she was the Real Me—the woman intent on becoming someone else. I’m always wondering where she went. Does everyone arrive at this stage of life, the one where we no longer recognize ourselves? And isn’t self-recognition-at-large just disbelief that we actually got old?
In my mid-20s, at a friend’s 30th birthday party, I had a fleeting thought that she was brave. How could she just…turn 30 like that? Without sliding, weeping, down a wall? Being in my 20s was my identity. At the time, most of my friends were older than I was and I relished my position as the baby of the group; it made me feel exempt from mortality.
In Sligo, Alison kept swimming in the ocean, but I didn’t join her until the last day. We found an empty beach. It was the first time I’d ever seen an empty beach.
I whimpered as I immersed. I grew up in cold ocean water, but upon discovering warm ocean water, I became a zealous convert, so I’d forgotten this about the Atlantic: Once you’re in, you go numb, and then cold feels like warm. I’ve always been skeptical of those Wim Hof diehards, whose religion is a daily ice bath, but maybe they’re on to something.
My first year living in Mexico, I spent most Sundays in the temazcal, the sweat lodge in my friend Katuza’s front yard. Katuza was a shaman who built temazcales all over Mexico by hand with clay, stones, and bricks, and lots of people gravitated to his house on Sundays; he was the pastor of a very hot church. Inside, we’d all hold rosemary under our noses, sing at the tops of our lungs, bang little drums as hard as we could—anything to distract ourselves from the discomfort. When we could no longer take it, we kept taking it. Until Katuza would tell us it was time. “Puerta,” he would say, and we’d crawl through the little door into the sunshine and dump ice water over our heads. Then we would re-enter the temazcal to bake again. Four times. Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. Afterward, we would lie on the grass, looking at the sky. My body and brain would buzz. I don’t mean that euphemistically; I felt a physical buzzing, as though my skin had turned to bees. Embedded in the satisfaction was something paradoxically Capitalist—the sense of having achieved through hard work. For a while, those temazcales, those visits to another world, were the answer. The cure-all.
When Katuza died in May of 2022, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop craving it—one more sweat, one more chance to show my friend I could do it. I could stay, even when it was deeply uncomfortable to stay. I could stay because he’d shown me the other side, taught me that the flip side of hell is bliss.
After that swim in Sligo, I was elated for hours. I kept telling Alison that she should have made me swim sooner. “I wasn’t going to make you,” she said, instead of producing a time machine.
Since then, in the same way I craved those temazcales, I’m craving cold water. But I don’t want a tub full of ice (sorry, Wim Hof). I want the Atlantic, the ocean I was raised in, the one I returned to 3,000 miles from home.
Love,
Diana
P.S. What’s your relationship to extreme hot/extreme cold? Let me know in the comments.
P.P.S. If you’re looking for a summer read, you’ll love The Wedding People by one of my favorite people/authors Alison Espach. (I have two Alisons in my life and heart!) It comes out tomorrow.
P.P.P.S. Let me know how you feel about me organizing a Zoom chat. I was thinking I could talk about some aspect of writing that interests you—travel writing or whatever. It would be great to hang out!
P.P.P.P.S. There’s still time to register for this free one-hour class I’m teaching online tomorrow night. Hope to see you!
Diana I love your writing, so real and accessible! Looking forward to the zoom.
I have a yearning to go just where you went. Can feel the cold water on my skin already! Thank you.