Life on the Willamette

Ascetic Convalescing

It’s been 9 months since my last post. A lot has happened in that time. I had my first real relationship since high school. I graduated MIT. I dropped $8k on hyperbaric oxygen therapy over 2 months. I went to Iceland. I ran a communal food plan. I threw a huge alumni reunion and cooked a 100lb pig. I jumped out of a 3rd story window into a big pile of snow. I pretended to be in a polycule to get a good deal on an AirBnB. I drove across the country. I helped build a raft and took it out on a river. I read every book that Robert Caro has ever written.

Unfortunately, The Most Important Thing did not happen: death remains undefeated. To the best of my limited ability to measure, my health is more-or-less unchanged.

:(

Wheelchair recap

In my last post, I said that I was planning on basically “building my own wheelchair” in order to force myself to stay within my limits, while continuing my normal activities as a student. I did this for most of the fall semester, but saw little improvement. I basically followed a two-week crash cycle, where I would spend about a week recovering alone in my room, a week feeling alright and catching up on work, and then eventually go out for some social event (ie, a dinner with a friend in town), and somehow end up back where I started despite my precautions

After a couple of months like this, I decided that it wasn’t really helping me feel any better. Rather, the self-enforced loneliness and isolation was making me feel worse. I’d also felt like there were a lot of holes in the wheelchair hypothesis, where if I was having enough fun I could occasionally do something pretty hard without crashing. So in early December I decided that it was time to set aside the wheelchair paradigm. It clearly was not possible to rest my way to recovery while at MIT, so I decided to just try and get the most out of my remaining semester of college.

Of course, I was still quite sick. Constant disassociation, weird memory holes, headaches, trembling hands, blurry vision, bouts of total confusion and forgetfulness, and exhaustion. As I’ve learned many many times, ignoring ME does not make it go away. I spent most of the rest of my time at MIT wrestling with two contradictory pieces of truth:

If you’re feeling bad, get out of your room. Go outside. See people. Isolation makes everything worse.

If you’re feeling bad, stay in your room. Rest. Don’t push yourself. Activity makes everything worse.

Both are sometimes true, the difficulty was knowing when. I’m not sure how much better I got at discerning this, but just accepting that both of these things were true made things a lot easier.

I think I was able to enjoy the semester about 20% of what I would have normally. But 20% of normal is still a lot, and I had a pretty good time all things considered.

The plan (this one will work I promise)

At some point last June, I very nearly backed out of returning to MIT. I had spoken to a few people who’d recovered, and most of their stories looked something like “I kept trying to keep pushing through my life and kept crashing over and over, but eventually I just moved back in with my parents and completely cut out any activity, and after a few months I gradually re-entered life.” It felt like going back to MIT was a continuation of the same mistake I’d been making for years, and I needed to just go home and rest.

In the end, I decided that I would rather go back to school, even if it wasn’t the best decision for my health, because I’d been looking forward to this senior year for so long, and I thought I would regret it for the rest of my life if I missed it. I told myself that if I still wasn’t better after I graduated, I would come back home and finally put in the rest I’d been putting off for so long.

So now, it’s time to rest.

Convalescence on a House Boat

My parents are recent retirees and need to downsize. My dad loves the water, and has always dreamed of living on a floating home (he lived on one for around a year in his early 20s and really enjoyed it). So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when a couple months ago I got a call from my dad informing me that they’re selling my childhood home and moving into a two-bedroom floating home located one mile away, on the Willamette river.

I love the Willamette, and while I’m a little bit sad to lose the home I grew up in, this is a huge stroke of luck. For one, when people ask me “hey Will what are you up to after graduation”, instead of having to say “I’m moving back in with my parents to sit in the dark and pray that I feel better” I can now say “I’m gonna spend the summer on a house boat!” Even though the basic facts of the matter do not change significantly, it sure sounds a lot better, and personal narratives are important!

The main goal of the summer is to rest. However, I’ll need something to keep me occupied.

There are also more tangible benefits to the move. It offers the perfect opportunity me to finally follow through on my lifelong ascetic escape fantasy, and spend a period fully disconnected from the material trappings of the world while I rest. There’s no Wi-Fi, and I’ll be leaving all of my devices out of reach at my old home. I’m well stocked on books and notebooks, and have a couple of woodcarving tools I might play around with. I’ll also be fasting!

I’m also finally biting the bullet and getting into meditation. In July, I’ll be doing a 10-day silent meditation retreat at the Dhamma Manda in Kelseyville, CA. I’m trying to stay realistic, and don’t expect it to dramatically improve how I feel, but it seems like a worthwhile thing I can spend my time doing in my present condition.

Future communications

Since I won’t have a phone or computer, and in the spirit of this ascetic bit that is the only thing keeping me going at this point, I’ve purchased a stack of envelopes and postage stamps, and am collecting as many addresses as I can. If you’d like to hear from me, send me your address in the next 24 hours and I’ll write you!

If I’m already on the houseboat by the time you want to reach me, you can write to me at

100 SE Harney St
Slip 11
Portland OR
97202

If all goes according to plan, I’ll post again from San Francisco in the fall.

If not, you know where to find me.