The consequences to my actions

I'm sick and feeling dramatic

June 1, 2026

The fascia in my right foot and ankle has become so sticky that whenever I walk long distances, the entire system pops and crackles like you’re stepping on rice krispies.

On bad days it feels like legs are wrapped in a sticky bubble wrap and on good days it feels like my legs are just my legs. Either way, I have rice krispies for feet apparently.

For those of you who don’t know or with non-injured limbs, fascia—as per Wikipedia—is a continuous, web-like sheet of fibrous connective tissue that surrounds and supports muscles, bones, organs, and nerves. It holds everything in place, enables tissues to glide smoothly against each other without friction, and transmits mechanical force during movement.

Fascia is often discussed in the broader context of its impacts on the nervous system and general metaphysical psyche. I wholeheartedly believe that my nervous system is hanging on by a thread, or in this case, a single strand of fascia. I know detoxes are an industry scam but sometimes I truly just want to be wrung out like a towel from the inside out. I have tried nearly everything imaginable to not only release my fascia, but to restore some semblance of equilibrium to my nervous system. I genuinely do not know what to do anymore. I could accept it all: that my calves are twisted and my ankle has the mobility of a giraffe, and I literally cannot feel peace or relaxation anymore. I’ll probably never be able to run again because my muscles seize up immediately upon impact. I’ll never feel a runner’s high again, I’ll never sit in peaceful silence, and I’ll never stop feeling like there’s something else I can be doing.

The cruelest part is that my fascia is trapped precisely because I cannot relax. If my brain will not rest, my body stays braced. Apparently, my body is now punishing me for the very compulsion it helped create, because I could not allow myself to be still long enough to let it recover. Two years later, my fascia remains unreleased, my neck remains tense, and my phone pick-up count remains, by any reasonable measure, through the roof.

June 5, 2026

Three days after I started writing this, I fell very sick. The sickest I’ve been in over two years. The kind where you wake up in a pool of sweat, and you can’t even sit up or hold your phone to doom scroll, and the only thing you can do is literally lie there. Not only that, this flu coincided with my period. As a friend so eloquently put it, I was genuinely being tag-teamed.

I forgot how shitty it feels to be sick as an adult, and how even shittier it feels to know that I am most definitely sick because I refused to let myself rest. Ironic timing, given that I was averaging 20,000 steps the week prior. This forced rest feels absolutely dreadful. I have only been bedridden for two days, but these two days have felt like the longest, most pathetic, most wasteful stretch of time I have experienced in recent memory. I cannot even recover peacefully, because I keep crying every hour from how purposeless my existence has felt lying here, unable to contribute anything to anything, not even my own healing.

As the dishes piled up (for less than 24 hours might I add), so did my belief that the inside air was starting to poison me. My brain and the nonstop crying must be the expulsion of toxins contracted from the bad vibes trapped in the fabric of my apartment. Although better than yesterday, my immune system is still much too weak to fight off the psychotic and illogical thoughts that are coming at me from every single angle.

There’s truly nothing like being sick when you’re an adult to reveal your most vulnerable true form, which for me is that of my 12-year-old self. I don’t know if it was the fever, the helplessness, the medication, or the pure delirium, but I genuinely could not stop crying for the last 48 hours. Every inconvenience, every text unanswered, every intrusive thought was a bullet straight to the chest with no defensive barrier whatsoever. I think I absorbed every negative intention in this world and swallowed them whole to stain me forever.

During this period of metaphorical self-mutilation, I finally watched the last movie in the Before Sunrise trilogy: Before Midnight. I’ve been putting off watching this because the complexities discussed feel unrelatable in that the trials and tribulations the pair face are beyond my comprehension of love. It delves into children, marriage, long term acceptance, none of which I have the lived experience to even fathom. But I already felt sufficiently unraveled, so I figured I might as well hand the last remaining thread to Richard Linklater and see what he did with it.

There are billions of people on this planet, and within them, millions of couples, pairs, marriages, arrangements, and entanglements born of every conceivable intention. Some are together for reasons void of love, some for the very definition. What I often observe is that every pair, no matter their passion and intensity, essentially argues about the same few topics in different fonts. No matter how singular and unique you believe your love to be, no matter how convinced you are that what you have resists categorization, your problems remain almost insultingly universal. What begins as the most ephemeral of love, is eventually distilled to the likes of an everyday marriage.

Sometimes I look around and wonder what exactly differentiates one couple from another, as in how different can these people possibly be from the ones sitting across from them? Especially if, at the end of the day, we all boil down to the same few tenets. We all want to be loved, we all want to be seen, and we all want to feel special. Somewhere out there is a 25-year-old girl, in bed with a fever, just wanting to be cared for like she was when she was 12.

There’s this incessant buzz in my ear. Like an invisible fly camping out in my peripheral vision.

I’m reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and in it she states: “When I wonder what it is that we are doing—in this brownstone, on this block, with this paper—the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives.”

I have not known war, nor have I known violence or duress to a comparable degree, but I do know one thing: in this glass castle, on this street, with this laptop, I’m fighting for my life.