I get motion sick easily.
Like, really easily. Beyond the reasonable range of human motion sickness. I know even the most stalwart inner ears get a little woozy on the usuals: windy roads, unventilated school buses, upside-down roller coasters. But those aren’t what I’m talking about.
I get sick on all of those too, of course—in addition to unwindy roads, ventilated buses, and mostly flat roller coasters at theme parks designed for very small children—but when I say I get motion sick easily, I mean from ridiculous things. Benign things. Things that may or may not involve motion at all.
| Benign Things That Have Made Me Motion Sick •Super MarioKart •Touchless car washes •Accidentally getting the scroll bar stuck on a long Microsoft Word document •Driving my own car •A documentary about mountaineering •A wheelchair •A ski gondola •Gentle porch swings •Memory foam mattresses •The chair in which I currently sit |
The piéce de résistance is that, after my c-section, I was too motion sick from the gurney ride from the recovery room to the NICU to hold my firstborn child.
I’m getting in touch with how much I hate this.
I mean, obviously, we all hate motion sickness. It feels like the hand of death hovering over your face, wearing rings made of blue cheese and flicking the back of your ear at unpredictable intervals. Everyone hates that.
But I mean I hate motion sickness as a way of being. As a part of my life in this body I can’t seem to medicate, meditate, or negotiate my way out of. I hate having to anticipate something as simple as movement—which is involved in nearly every fun thing humans like to do, unfortunately—before we go anywhere other than my house. I’m the one you have to stop for and plan around. I’m your friend with motion sickness. I’m the problem.
This is a lonely way to move through the world. Having a debilitating sensory experience that no one else is having is isolating almost beyond description. You think you must be making it up. If it continues, even in the face of every antihistamine you can cram into your bloodstream, you begin to suspect you must be from a different species.
For example.
On our way home from spring break a couple weeks ago, we flew through turbulence of an apocalyptic sort. Lightning and 70-mph wind gusts—from a storm system I later learned spawned 17 tornadoes in Indiana—were rattling us around in the plane like a can of spray paint. At landing time, the pilot circled the Indy airport twice. Then he apologized over the intercom and told us to hang on for a third attempt as the luggage bins flew open above our heads.
The woman next to me—an anxious flyer, she’d warned me as she sat down—was pressed against the oval window, wondering aloud if we’d survive. “Do planes land?” she kept asking. Her clammy hand gripped my forearm. “Do planes ever land? Do you think this plane will land?”
I didn’t really care how it ended as long as it was quick.
For the previous two hours, I’d been offering her intermittent comfort. I didn’t mind. A little unsubstantiated panic isn’t much when you’ve taught middle school, and since my daughter was blissfully absorbed in Frozen 2, I was happy to toss a little reassurance this woman’s way whenever we hit a bump.
In fact, when the cataclysmic turbulence started, I didn’t even reach for my motion sickness bracelet because I didn’t want to disturb her. She already had an iron grip on my arm by then, and I figured she was worse off than me. Besides, I’d front-loaded with an all-natural Dramamine. I’d be fine!
So my tombstone shall read.
By the time we were about 10 minutes into what would be nearly half an hour of constant shaking and swooping, however, I had to tell her the truth.
“I can’t talk to you right now,” I said. My forearm had tightened under her grip, pressing my body as far as possible into the back of my seat. “I’m going to be sick.”
AND THEN I WAS.
The thing about motion sickness is that you never know whether you’ll actually vomit. Most of the time it’s just your inner ear seeking attention, but this one was good for it. The nuclear option. I had to use the actual airplane vomit bag for actual airplane vomit.
And you know what I heard, just before I started heaving into its wax-lined expanse?
People talking.
People behind me, people across the aisle, people ahead of me. Just talking. Chatting. Having conversations in which they formed complete sentences and then responded with other complete sentences. One guy was laughing. He had that stage-actor volume men get on planes, and he was joking with the guy next to him that the Diet Coke in his backpack would explode after this.
I knew then I must have inhabited this earthly form by mistake.
Folks, when you’re motion sick, you can’t do anything. There’s no talking. There’s no laughing. There’s no thinking about that sweet, sweet can of Diet Coke waiting for you at the end of the jetway, exploded or no. It’s just you and your churning stomach. Every ounce of attention you possess is trained on clenching your teeth and estimating the number of witnesses if you throw up.
I cannot FATHOM what it’s like to exist in a body that doesn’t have to do that. To be able to skip happily onto the decks of small boats and amusement park rides without snorting a vial of ginger beforehand. To be that guy, sitting in a seat just like mine, able to yuk it up without a care for the imminent return of his Starbucks breakfast sandwich.
Because you do care about that breakfast sandwich. You care about it more than anything. The vomit shame is real, and it’s as isolating as the rest of it. Adults just aren’t supposed to throw up in public. Much less so when EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON AROUND YOU is handling it all just fine, and you get to be the nauseated orchid they never should have let leave the hothouse.
Eventually, we landed. Daphne finished Frozen 2. Everyone I could see from my seat looked fine; people even applauded and laughed as the plane rolled to a stop. The vomit bag had bendable sealing tabs, like a bag of coffee, and I prepared to carry it off with me like a dainty little purse of despair. I’d never felt so disconnected from other humans in my life.
And then I looked at the woman next to me.
She was wiping her eyes with a tissue. When she noticed me, she handed a fresh one over. I realized I was crying, too—those bonus tears you get for throwing your digestive system into reverse.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I’m sorry you had to see me throw up.”
Her demeanor changed at once. She’d been a disaster moments before. Now she pulled herself up and patted my arm.
“Sweetie, I’m a nurse. A little vomit doesn’t bother me.”
And there it is. The reason I can’t hate my motion sickness all the way all the time.
It brings me back into the stream of humanity.
We all suffer, huh? For me it was the barf bag, for her it was a panic attack. I got to feel strong and stable while she had her suffering; she got to feel strong and stable while I had mine. Diet Coke Guy will have his own version of this somewhere, someplace, too, with some invisible suffering I’ll never know about, but it will be an experience he has in common with pretty much one hundred percent of humans who have ever lived.
He’ll suffer, and then he’ll help someone else who’s suffering.
That’s the whole game. The magic ingredient in the empathy cookie is always suffering.
I do hate being your motion sick friend, just as I hate all the other sensitivities in my body—to sun, to cold, to light, to country music on restaurant speakers—that make me not super fun to go places with.
But I don’t hate sharing the human experience with, you know, humans.
I just would like it to come with fifty percent less vomit. Please.
