When All Vanity is Gone

I never thought myself guilty of vanity until I had my health taken away from me. Before all this drama with nerve damage, what people thought of me was not a major concern because I didn’t worry about other people’s standards, just my own. As long as I was living up to my standards, I was content.

At the most superficial level, the only time I ever really looked in the mirror was to shave or brush my teeth. Sure, I wanted to look ok but I didn’t think much about how to look the part, whatever part it may be that I was playing. Requiring minimal upkeep, my wardrobe has always primarily consisted of a couple pairs of jeans and a revolving selection of flannel shirts from Kohl’s, some of which I’ve owned for longer than a grown man should. For work I would just swap out the jeans for pants and maybe a flannel for something that isn’t so, well, flannelly. But flannels definitely made the work rotation as well. Now that I’m looking back on it, perhaps a little vanity couldn’t have hurt.

But these last four years have taught me that I did care how people saw me. Maybe not in terms of style or physical appearance, but in personality and ability. Before all this trouble I was the guy who wanted to take on life at full speed. I was the guy who climbed all the 4000 footers in a year. I wanted to be the last one up at every social event, soaking up as many laughs and stories as I could. I wanted to have as many real friendships and conversations as one could possibly have. I wanted all of those things because they mattered to me, not because it was what I thought others wanted of me. But when that guy became invisible to everyone around me, it was in some ways more painful than my electrified nerves.

For the first half of my life I was the guy who said yes to every possible adventure because life is too short, and to be quite honest, I realize now that I had a bit of a gluttony issue, which manifested itself not in terms of food, but in a deep desire to have as many life experiences as possible. My appetite was unbalanced and nothing but a serious medical predicament like mast cell disease was ever going to slow me down. I came to understand all this because one of my wife’s hobbies during covid was learning about enneagram personality tests, and after some not-so-subtle prodding, she got me to use it in order to self-evaluate. If you’re not familiar with enneagrams, they are essentially numbers relegated to personality types, plotted out in sort of a circular Venmo diagram, attempting to get you in better touch with who you really are. Some numbers relate to other numbers more readily and we are all composed of every number to some degree, but we are primarily weighted towards one that defines most of what we do and how we behave. Turns out I’m a 7, also known as The Enthusiast.

Now I’ve taken personality tests before like Myers-Briggs and such, and I’ve read all the great philosophers and then some, but nothing has ever provided some clear truths to me about who I am and how I’m constructed. So it was with a skeptic’s view I entertained this enneagram escapade. But I have to say, I was taken with it right away. Once I took a bunch of tests and learned that I was a clear 7, I learned that people like me are driven by a desire to be happy and avoid pain. We like to live according to our impulses, have great adventures, avoid small talk, and experience BIG talk. We want to have fun and even though I might not care how I look, be seen as fun. Because being seen that way draws more people towards me who I can then have great connections with and enjoy new experiences. Holy crap, I thought, that does sound like me. Shit, I’m a 7. I’ll be damned.

These last four years have really given this 7 a run for his money. And learning that my personality type is one that avoids pain at all costs has been illuminating, because I haven’t had a pain-free day since 2017. When I look back on this time, unable to eat without pain, suffering spasms up and down my spine, unable to grab a beer with the fellas, I realize that I really cared that people did see me as a strong, healthy guy who was fun to be around and was always up for adventure. Having to say no to adventure and really, just everyday life, has been torture. I mean, it’s hard to say yes to life when even a glass of water sends shockwaves up your spine.

Since being out of commission, I’ve gotten better about saying no when I know it’s going to hurt my health. It didn’t come easy, nor did losing so much physical strength, but eventually I yielded and accepted my current circumstances. Accepting them as permanent runs against my nature, which we now know from enneagram wisdom is designed to have a positive outlook no matter what, so if I’m going to survive I simply can’t accept my condition as permanent. Similarly, while I could accept no longer eating out, or being able to work like I used to, or exercising, or sleeping lying down, I couldn’t accept that life had to be without fun. So I said yes to vacations I couldn’t really handle and coached my kids’ baseball games. I went out to dinner and watched other people eat, just so we could go out. I tried and I tried, and earned my smiles here and there, but I certainly wasn’t as fun to be around as I used to be and it hurt knowing that others could see the difference.

It took a few years for me to get over not being seen how I wanted to be seen. In conversations with friends around town I put up my best face, presenting myself as healthy as I could while trying to hide that I was getting electrocuted by broken nerves the entire time. Eventually I gave up trying to be the good soldier and started letting friends in on how much pain I was in. As I got better at doing this, it was cathartic. Somehow by connecting others to what was really going on, I found out who my really good friends are, and was also able to let some very important people know that the same guy is still here; he’s just doing what he can to claw his way out of this hole.

These last few months, as the nerves get closer and closer to healing, and the soft muscle tissue around the lower part of my back slowly grows, I think I can safely say that I don’t have much vanity left, if any at all. Living off a diet mostly comprised of ice cream, because everything else hurts too much, I’ve gotten pretty tubby. But I don’t care. I’d rather be fat without pain than skinny in hell. I also have to do these weird convulsive stretches whenever the pain comes on, which makes me look like I’m trying to remove a “Kick me” sign from my back that is just out of reach. I used to try to do these stretches in private but now I don’t care. I’d walk the streets naked if it made the pain go away.

Yesterday I was out for a walk in my neighborhood and I did a series of these convulsive stretches in front of six or seven of my neighbor’s houses, complete with audible grunts and eye-raising grimaces. It looked like I was practicing for Halloween, where I was evidently planning to go as the offspring of Igor and Frankenstein. But I don’t care. Because each stretch and grunt brings me a millimeter closer to a day where the pain ends.

Humor or Denial? There is only one healthy approach.

So if my neighbors see me doing monster impressions in broad daylight on every day of the year, so be it. If I have to interrupt the next conversation we have in order to eat a quart of ice cream because I’m having painful spasms, so be it. The nature of my disorder is so ridiculous there is no way to have any vanity anymore. I’m exposed, broken, and want to laugh more about it.

My kids get the idea. Oftentimes they catch me in the house in random positions as I try to stem another round of painful jolts. As I grunt my way through spasms and developing muscle, sometimes they sympathize and sometimes the little devils all make fun of me by mimicking me and saying “oh my back, my back!” It sounds coarse but they aren’t the only ones who need a laugh about all this after four years. It gets a laugh out of my wife and I can’t help but laugh too. Laughing helps us know that things are going to be alright, because really, what else can you do? You’ve got to find a way to laugh and not caring how I’m seen has made me the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time.