This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.
Every week, you get a fresh and of-the-moment personal mini-essay from a queer writer. These typically come out every Wednesday but we missed the last few weeks because I’ve been hard at work on the second issue of our print magazine.
I have no casual interests, only obsessions. This is something I used to hold against myself. I thought moving from one obsession to another made me fickle, uncertain, maybe even a little fake. This summer alone, I’ve obsessed over sharks, shark movies, hurricanes, the migrational patterns of birds, and two women who homesteaded in the 19th century in the town where my wife and I lived in central Florida who were very clearly lovers despite historical accounts designating them “close friends.” Okay, so typing that all out, it sounds like my summer obsessions are all loosely connected by the theme of Lives in Florida, but still, my obsessions so often feel like whims, like hobbies picked up and promptly abandoned.
Only, I don’t abandon them. I just shift them around an ever-expanding mental stovetop, relegating some, at times, to backburners, lowering them to a simmer, but never really cutting the gas altogether. Did I think about sharks yesterday? No. But I’m thinking about them now. And I’m wondering how many more shark films I’ll have to watch to really feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see in the massive canon, a bizarre goal with no purpose I’ve set for myself.
All this to say: I can rarely experience a thing without wanting to investigate it thoroughly. This is, I suppose, why I’ve fashioned a career out of writing essays and criticism. My latest obsession born of a perfectly normal human experience? Pain. Specifically, the way pain can sometimes be relieved by…pain.
Beginning strength training and rebeginning competitively playing tennis in the past 18 months has completely rewritten the story of my body and my relationship to it. Before, when I experienced something like a headache or worse, I’d pop an Advil or two, move along. Now I want to understand every sensation I have in my body, the soreness, the twinges, the throbs. I know when a headache is from dehydration and when it’s something else. These are all simple things, of course, but they require a level of attention to and care for a body I rarely gave myself in the past. It’s not as simple as loving my body now. I want my body to do beautiful, terrible things.
So I push myself in the gym and on the court. I’m not saying I’m unsafe. But to suggest there isn’t some level of risk to the activities I do and the ways I challenge myself would be naive. When I said something about my newly onset chronic foot pain to my wife, she suggested I maybe push myself a little less, not take a break from tennis entirely but maybe just play and train a bit less, let my feet rest. But that solution is inconceivable to me. I won’t go so far as to say the pain is the point of getting strong and of playing tennis, but it is part of the point. Or, at least, the goals I have — to build muscle, to compete at as high a level as I can in the recreational tennis world, do require pain. There is no way to do it without it. This level of requisite and ongoing pain, too, is different than injury. So much of the strength training is about preventing injury. But that act of preventing future pain does indeed sometimes yield pain. I am fascinated by this paradox.
Take my aching feet for example. I have pretty bad flare ups of extensor tendonitis, which before I learned that term I described as “top of foot pain.” It makes standing and walking quite painful. Certain stretches before and after intense tennis activity help keep it from getting bad during matches themselves. But without fail, a couple hours after I get off the court, pain shoots through the tops of my feet. I tried all sorts of solutions, including new shoes, a different way of tying the laces, and more recently, insoles. They help…a little.
The solution to the pain I’ve found that works the best? More pain. Specifically, foot ice baths. If you’re an athlete or someone who otherwise lifts, runs, lives an active life, then perhaps you already know about the strangely euphoric sensation of a cold plunge. The worst part of a cold plunge, in my personal opinion, is how it feels in the feet, like being stabbed with a bunch of needles over and over. So, a foot ice bath is like isolating that worst part. You plunge your feet and only your feet into icy cold water. It burns.
My sister, a former multi-sport athlete and current distance runner, said I should try to work my way up to seven minutes with my feet fully submerged. The first time I attempted it, I did 30 second intervals for three minutes, screaming the whole time. I was, of course, making it so much worse for myself by putting them in and out. My feet would, my sister insisted, go numb eventually if I just left them in. The pain, though, felt for some reason less bearable than the extensor tendonitis itself. Again, I’m fascinated by the whims of pain, how my tolerance can fluctuate wildly depending on context.
In her essay “On Pain” from her excellent newsletter FIGHT WEEK, Laura van den Berg writes about how “the right dose of pain can still make my brain hum in a beautiful-feeling way.” I relate strongly. There are all sorts of studies about the relationship between endorphins, adrenaline, and pain. The body releases endorphins in response to sudden pain, in order to curb it. It is the remedy, sure, but it is also the intrinsic side effect, pain leading to something that makes the body feel good.
I myself derive more than a little bit of pleasure of pain, in the right context. But that feels entirely separate from what I’ve come to understand as requisite pain. The pain that comes with my obsession. A side effect, some might call it. But I think it’s more symbiotic than that. It is a privilege, of course, to choose this pain.
And so, at least twice a week, usually following tough matches, I soak my feet in an ice bath. I’m better at it now. I got myself up to over three minutes by putting on a Megan Thee Stallion song and forcing myself to leave them in for the duration. Eventually, my sister revealed that if I was really so much of a baby, I could wear wool socks while doing it, which would decrease the burning sensation without losing the benefits. She couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?! Using the sock method, I’m up to seven minutes per plunge. Maybe you would be stronger than me. While under the ice water, my socked feet still burn. I listen to music or read to distract myself for those seven blazing minutes.
After, when my feet are dried, lotioned, and tucked into slippers, they feel better than they’ve ever felt. That brief pain in the ice bath yields lasting relief. The answer to my pain? Acute, bright, icy pain.
There is easy meaning-making to do here, I think. Something about how the poison and its antidote are not so dissimilar. But The Parlour is more a place where we ask questions and ponder, not a space where there’s pressure to have all the answers yet. I’d like to think about it some more and invite you to think about it, too. Obsessions are best enjoyed together.
