Self Care I

  

Chalazions are curable lumps that form on your eyelids when the tear glands get blocked. Or something. I read it on the internet. The doctor simply said, “there are numerous factors” and grunted in acknowledgement to himself. I obviously didn’t mean to ask why I, in particular, had got one, but maybe because I didn’t come across as the curious type, dressed and dusted as I was to look more like an angry man asking for an explanation for all the miseries he’s had to suffer in life, he chose not to delve into the science of it. But it's also possible that mf couldn’t remember what those factors were the way an eye specialist is supposed to. He pronounced it wrong. He called it a “Cerizine.” His prescription looked like an ancient hieroglyph. Plus, being the only employee at the clinic, he played both the doctor and the orderly who sits in the lobby and notes down a patient’s name and buzzes them in, grabs the fresh prescription when the doctor’s done and runs to the meds counter to make sure that the patient doesn’t run off to a favorite pharmacy around the corner or, God forbid, decide to get a different professional opinion. It was all him.

But, to be fair, he did far better than the doctor I’d gone to see previously for the same affliction, this sad after-image of a nasty stye I’d been carrying around for some time by then, who had not only refused to tell me anything about the problem but had also displayed extreme callousness while inspecting my eyesight. He had skipped that part where the optometrist lets you try various lenses for the perfect fit after inspecting the eyesight through the auto-refractor.

I'd said, “doctor, will you not ask me to put the trial lenses on and read small letters on that TV screen?”, and he'd replied, “oh, no that won’t be necessary.”

His confident dismissal almost made me assume that maybe it’s a new procedure which is more reliable than the patient’s sense of what feels right because, in all honesty, after putting on many similarly powered lenses in a visit like that to the optometrist, I always feel a tinge of paranoia that I said yes to a wrong lens which is definitely going to damage my eyesight even further to which the optometrist always says “oh, just let your eyes adjust to the new lens and it’ll feel just right.”

But I thought to myself that day “yeah, cool, it might be a new procedure but just let me get a second opinion, anyway.”  

I went to a different optometrist and he found a slightly different reading of my eyesight and introduced me to what is known as astigmatism. I can never recall what it means when I need to.

Compared to that, I liked the orderly much better and I thought I could trust his assessment as he assured me repeatedly that it’s a harmless thing, more common than I imagine. He didn’t prescribe a lot of antibiotic tablets unlike the previous doctor and advised me to apply a hot compress to the afflicted region twice a day for about a month. If it still persisted, I could just remove it surgically. The scar wouldn’t be permanent and it’s not an expensive procedure but I would need to try practising self-care for some time before it came to that, something that we should all be doing anyway, he said, ugly-eyed or not.

Self-care. I’ve heard this phrase so many times in life but I can’t say I’ve known it quite well. Mac Miller wrote a song called Self Care. I discovered it two years after his death. I learned, after the fact, that Mac Miller had attempted self-care but he wasn’t very successful. Josh’s mother, Rose, in Please Like Me is another one to dabble in it. She’s doing a bad job at the moment but there’s one and a half seasons left and things can still change for the better. As for myself, I haven’t thought about it a lot in my life. If I did, my teeth would be in better shape, my gastronomical clock would tick tighter than it does now, and I’d probably still have a bit more hair on my head.

I tried serious skincare for a while, though. The beginning of my skincare journey was a joyous end to years and years of misdirected insecurity. At first, it meant keeping it clean and moisturized. Then someone on the internet said that it meant wearing sunscreen, keeping it aerated, staying hydrated, sleeping well, coping with stress, learning a bit of stoicism to keep oneself still on difficult days and so on and so forth. Soon, it began to mean avoiding public transport and two-wheelers, and eventually, it meant avoiding the outdoors altogether. I diligently followed the progression until the moisturizing part. I realize now that much like my formal education, my skin-care education too has been a collection of epiphanies and assumptions haphazardly put together by my overconfident ass.

Apparently, some parts of your skin are easier to care for than others. The most notorious bit is the skin on your nape. A cousin of mine, only eleven, who hasn’t yet caught wind of this life-affirming concept, got his nape burned into a rough crust from wilding about in the sun all his life and at this point “hide” better describes it than “skin”. A friend also got his nape baked into a cookie but unlike the little devil he got it from too much work in the sun and very little play. It doesn’t take much effort or philosophizing to realize that that’s how self-care exists in this country and before long, as the limits of my own social standing made the limits of my skin health clearer and clearer, I began to notice more and more markers of economic inequality on people’s bodies. Crooked teeth that weren’t strung tight to stand in a straight line sufficiently early in a kid’s life, napes that spread out of shirt collars like cooling magma, feet that have the strips of Hawaii sandals stamped onto them, elbows that fold into a post-apocalyptic mutant ballsack: these ostensibly innocent markers of individuality, despite the ongoing discourse about body positivity, return time and time again to re-consecrate the class boundaries we continually keep trying to cross by daring to love and desire beyond our class groups. 

But I feel I am being unnecessarily and hypocritically vitriolic about the foundations of aesthetic and sexual discrimination that, for all I know, may have existed for all of human history. After all, I, too, have reaped the small glories of a decent skin routine. The feeling of your two feet, moisturized and silky smooth, for instance, gently brushing against hers equally self-cared, if not more, under a freshly cleaned blanket: that’s a feeling as old as cuddling. Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors also like their partners to be all moisturized and conditioned to perfection or did a mating dance suffice, or a show of brute strength, a painting of stick figures, maybe? Did the crooked teeth get to mate? Did they get called names? Were they ever told, “oh, it’s not you, it’s me.” As I exited the orderly’s clinic, thinking about the histories of touch and love of our great ancestors, I put the prescription carefully in the bag along with the medicines. Some serious self-preservation shit was about to go down.