John Phillip Bogulski & Tarrah Lee Curtis

Part of me likes the feeling of being sick.* You can’t really say that without an asterisk attached, so I made sure to asterisk it up. I have said this before and people think I’m crazy, but I think deep down a lot of people probably feel the same if they really think about it. They just don’t want to say it without tempting the fate of something really bad happening. It’s not the actual sickness, and this definitely only applies to easily recoverable sicknesses. My mom, who was going through chemo, once told me she hoped I felt better soon when I was sick, and I replied that it was fine because I kind of like being sick. Long story short, it’s not something you should say to someone actually sick. And I do not want to tempt any real illnesses. I already have severe back problems and feel like shit constantly. I would never want anything worse for me or anyone else. But minor sicknesses like a cold or the flu are in a different category, and this is the sick I’m talking about.

I’m not insane. I think the appeal is the vulnerability and the struggle to get better. Life is all about struggles. Really it’s just one giant struggle. We’re always just at some stage of pushing a boulder up a hill. This past year for me has been a lot of struggles. Finding that perfect job (or any job), finding inner happiness when it’s hard to find something to be happy about, maintaining relationships when I’m often too miserable to even discuss anything. It’s all been horrible. This past year I feel like I’ve been stuck at the bottom making no progress with the metaphorical boulder. The only movement that damn boulder was slipping further down the hill I already thought I was at the bottom of. For me currently, it’s hard to feel that the boulder will be moved in an upward direction ever again. And when you’re in that state, it’s very hard to feel any semblance of hope.

And that’s why the feeling of being sick can be so rewarding. When you’re sick, you’re dealing with a whole different boulder. And again this only applies to a sickness that lasts a few days and doesn’t require any doctors. But when I feel faced with an illness like that I’m happy to be focused on this other boulder. This boulder that I know will eventually go up that hill because I have successfully tackled it time and time again. The trajectory of sickness generally is you get sick, then you get better. It’s a much easier boulder to deal with. And it really puts things in perspective. In both college and my work life, I never let a sickness get in the way of putting my best foot forward. I felt bad, but somehow the struggle of being sick made what I had to do not as hard. The struggle shifted to working while sick and not the work itself. Perspective. I’m in a much different place now than I was then, and I obviously have a lot of stuff I need to deal with, but when I’m sick that gets to take the backseat. I was sick with something for 2 weeks straight in January, and it was the best time of my unemployment. I felt horrible, but it simplified my whole life. I wasn’t worried about what I was doing with my life. I was working to fix my life through being sick, and I preferred it much more.

All this may sound like I’m misremembering what it’s actually like to be sick, and I’m simply trying to grasp onto anything other than my current reality. Wrong! I’m sick AF right now. (So you can chop up any nonsensical parts of this post to that.) I don’t know what it is or what caused it, but it started to hit me last night, the last night of my trip to New York. I was sitting in a Broadway performance of SpongeBob SquarePants when a headache started, and soon after I found myself at a bar overcome with chills and unable to stop shaking from my body feeling like it was in the tundra. So I left the bar, picked up some Gatorade and Emergen-C, and went back to my friend’s place where I was staying to take a long hot shower and pop all the meds I safely could. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I still don’t feel great. But I feel better. And even though I felt way better even 24 hours ago before this all started, I feel better now than when the sickness. Because I am sick and I am getting through this. I’ve already made progress with the sickness boulder, and that other real world boulder is nowhere in sight. In 4 hours, I will be on a 6-hour flight back to LA, and I’m not sure if I will like being sick in that context, but hey just more struggle to overcome. Struggle is at the heart of that Nietzsche quote after all: “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” He’s talking about struggle, but more importantly it’s about struggle you overcome. What doesn’t kill you is still going to hurt you like hell. But if you fight it and overcome it, you become stronger. And that’s what nice about sickness as a microcosm for life’s struggles. It’s the simplest form of struggle, and the only struggle I know for sure I can overcome.

So I like being sick. I get that it’s a statement that you still might not understand, but I did my best to explain what I mean by it. And if you still don’t understand, maybe next time you’re sick with a cold or the flu, don’t focus on how shitty you feel. Focus on how you feel bad now, but you are at a point where things can only go up from there. Since those opportunities are few and far between, I will take the smallest silver lining when I can get it.

*Read everything else I write and don’t take this sentence at face value.