Emotion lives in our throats

Also, retroactive career advice for a conwoman.

This week I wrote a personal thing for paying subscribers and got a handful of gorgeous messages in response. So, the thing in the personal thing made me cry the bad tears and then the messages made me cry the good tears. P.S. I’m fine!

Crying is like in the Watchmen graphic novel when Dr Manhattan talks shite about live and dead bodies having the same particles. At the end of the day, all the tears end up streaming mascara down undereye. And speaking of Watchmen and crying, I highly recommend you binge the new HBO show ASAP. “This is the moment” is a line from a recent episode which had me simultaneously gulping down a keening moan and letting the tear dam burst.

Watchmen is a love story. It’s the type of love story that when you realise you’re involved, invested and entwined, it hurts your throat. Some people say our emotions are ruled by bacteria in our bellies. I think emotion lives in our throat. When I’m upset or elated or stressed or anything that tips the scale, my throat closes up a bit. Or it burns. Or it aches, that longing reflex. I’m aware of every swallow and gathering of saliva.

There is a certain class stratum of women who end up at the GP every two years or so getting our thyroid tested. We’re trying to work out why we feel a certain way, why our bodies are disobedient and careening, why we’re so tired and unable. We want answers. And the blood test comes back with the wrong - in a way - answer. You’re on your own, this is you, you can’t blame anything, revel in it! Blood tests don’t take a stance on late-stage capitalism or your message inbox. My blood test doesn’t know that I’m living in Dublin over 10 years.

Imagine if instead of conning the world that her teeny tiny cheap blood tests could give you a full health picture, Elizabeth Holmes claimed to have invented a machine that took a teeny tiny drop of you and it then told you what you needed to hear: your boss is a bully, take a break from that person, put a banana in your bag every morning, unsubscribe from the boutique’s newsletters, delete one social media account and see how you feel, stop drinking as much. I think what I’m trying to say is, imagine if Elizabeth Holmes had instead set up an Instagram and ‘curated’ some typography about self-care. That way she’d have given people something to work with or ignore, instead of the false hope she spun and spun that she had the answers, the cure for worry.