It’s hard to believe that April is here. I recently wished unironically a happy new year to someone I hadn’t seen since the year prior, and yet here we are, way more than one hundred days into 2025, accosted by our phones on a daily basis and drowning in shallow water.

The water, however, is everywhere; most notably, the biggest and filthiest puddles are coming from our increasingly fascist administration.

It’s hard to talk about the intensely personal and weave it with the universal. Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you probably have a certain world view that espouses things like compassion and education and actual common sense –the one that takes time to go over things, not the faux kind that sees generosity and interprets it as lack of toughness that needs to be subjugated. So let’s just agree that this is a safe space and also agree to say that the foulest puddles are the twin puddles of authoritarianism and genocide that keep trying to drown us all. We are united in that big pain and we have to try to find joy wherever we can.

But I’ve been putting off telling you about my esophageal woes, so let’s begin.

I have GERD. Well, I’m pretty sure and the GI doctor I spoke to is also very sure. He would be surer if he could stick a hose down my throat, except for the pesky detail about my one symptom: The pain I get is so intense sometimes that it makes it hard to breathe and this could be a symptom of something being amiss with my heart. While I don’t think there is, in fact, anything wrong with my heart, I neglected to mention that the pain sometimes also causes my arms to tingle. This feels like an important detail to have omitted, but we’re all a little bit cagey with the symptoms that, if divulged, could save our lives. But I digress.

Anyway, I probably have always had a little touch of the acid reflux. When I was a little kid, birthday party excess usually ended up in vomit and tears. Sometimes, fruit gave me a stomachache. And I am a disastrous day-drinker– where others are sexy and bawdy and just plain drunk, I’m slattern and sleepy and I invariably end up with a raging headache. I always thought it was just a matter of not being able to hold my liquor, and yet I’m able to drink a not-insignificant amount of Irish whiskey with gusto and with not a trace of a hangover. Tequila doesn’t wipe me out: it combs my hair out and tells me I’m pretty. I have tolerance, as it turns out– just not for sugary stuff. Mimosas are bad; neat liquor is comparatively okay.

But what may have started as just a little bit of burps here and there has become a full fledged exploration into what my stomach will and will not tolerate these days and the most amusing thing to me is that my stomach really seems to want me to eat very virtuously. Sugar? What are you, eight? Caffeine?You’ve got to be kidding. Carbonated drinks? NEVER! Alcohol! I don’t think so! Tomatoes! TOM BRADY WOULD NEVER.

So even though I am still scared to eat and sometimes I gingerly bite into things fully expecting to be lurched into a hell of my own making, I am also looking kind of amazing thanks to my stomach’s alarm system. As it turns out, all those things people say about avoiding caffeine, alcohol and sugar are right: They just aren’t great for you. Oh sure, they taste delicious and make life more fun (or just a little bit more bearable these days). But they bloat you up and make you jowly and tired and haggard and take valuable minutes of sleep away from you. Say yes to a very boring diet and glowing skin.

I often wonder if my acid pen is somehow related to my acid esophagus, or whether our psyches have some sort of metaphysical effect on our health. Or rather, an actual physical effect but from a metaphysical source? You know what I mean, I think. Are our diseases metaphors for the aforementioned puddles in which we all drown from time to time? Maybe it’s all just an unfortunate and sometimes tragicomical coincidence.

I’ll wrap this up: Sometimes you have to share big joys to bring a little joy to everyone else. And sometimes, you have to share your big woes so that others may find a little of their woe in your woe and look for answers. Could this have been a post on Reddit? Absolutely.