Many

One, two, chaos.

I’m pretty dopamine-depleted tonight. I show up eventually to write—only after showering, putting on soft pyjamas, and attending to the flotsam of admin that accumulates like cosmic dust in the corners of my brain. But hey: at least I’m not letting things fester. Much.

My wife and I have our own private patois that surfaces during moments of absurdity and crisis. One of our most reliable terms is simply: many. When there’s too much going on, when tasks exceed bandwidth and everything is spiralling, we just say IT’S MANY, or sometimes just many, while waving limp hands in the air like drowning kittens. We have a small stuffed toy tiger who, we decided, can only count to “many” after two, because he’s a tiger. It turns out the Pirahâ people of the Amazon count like this, which made me fret that we were accidentally being racist. But mostly, we’re just overwhelmed.

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Me? I’m more like Moon Moon, the stupidest wolf on the internet, who can only count to potato and is proud of it.

Lately, life has been many. If I wanted to be haughty, I’d say I feel like Virginia Woolf in her essay Evening Over Sussex, realising that it is better to “sit and soak” because “nature has given you six little pocket-knives with which to cut up the body of a whale.” That sentence floats like a soap bubble and lands like an anvil. The ridiculousness of being human: of trying to experience life at all without drowning in its scale or absurdity. Unless of course, you live, laugh, lobotomise.

But I can’t be haughty right now because the geyser’s element burnt out. Then the temperature relay (whatever that is) joined the electric choir invisible. The medical aid rejected an expensive consultation. A well-meaning colleague resurrected a bureaucratic zombie, now chomping at my inbox like an undead project manager. My daughter’s insomnia is distressing us all. I can’t hear anything over the high buzzing in my left ear. I can barely last half-an-hour in gym without wheezing whereas pre-surgery I hit personal bests on bench, deadlift and squat in the same week (such gym very bro so flex wow). How very, awfully, maddeningly suburban of me.

If I were my 17-year-old astrology-adjacent self (yes, I had an astrology calendar and could draw natal charts), I’d worry that Mercury was in retrograde. Except it isn’t and it feels more like the entire Oort Cloud has collapsed into a rogue planet that’s destabilising my whole ecliptic. My anxiety has basically decided that all the planets are in all the houses and they’ve chosen Scorpio—my goddamn rising sign—for their rave. (Scorpio: where mystery and chaos are lifestyle choices).

Today we cared for two patients undergoing acetabular reconstructions: agonising operations, generally. One was a young man with osteogenesis imperfecta. His pelvis cracked because his bones are glass. The other had been top-and-tailed by a car, fracturing both his neck and his hip. Pain management was challenging for both. My anaesthetic trolley looked like a child’s chemistry set: ampoules in pinks, blues, and ambers, all very tidy and vaguely terrifying.

Tomorrow I see the ENT. He will insert a tiny camera up my nose and take a gander at my sinuses, six weeks post-surgery. I must remember to mention the fluid behind my middle ear. Earlier, I misheard a colleague and believed, for one luminous minute, that she had two husbands. Another colleague’s voice didn’t reach me at all. (How To Embarrass Yourself In Front of a New Registrar Without Even Trying. First article free.)

And all the while, I keep glancing at my inbox, imagining my supervisor composing an email titled: WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR WORK. Because I am too terrified to send him the bleeding, raw chunks I have managed. I’m disappointing him by the second. I’m disappointing everyone by the second.

Well, dears. Get in line. I’m at the front of the queue.

Enough with the martyrdom, then. Self-mythologising is so 2010s and I don’t have a Pinterest mood board to accompany it. I must be grateful for the privilege of these challenges, I keep telling myself. I half-believe it at times.

But mostly, it’s all just many.

(Consider this post proof of life while the many holds me hostage).