There's no escaping the smoke
Even if we try to tune out, there's no avoiding reality
Welcome to Chief Complaint! For those of you who are new, this newsletter features intermittent musings about medicine, gender, parenting, and body liberation — all from your friendly neighborhood primary care doc. I’m so happy you’re here.
When I woke up on Sunday morning, I noticed a strange thing in the bathroom: it smelled like a campfire.
My first thought was that something was burning. I checked the trash bin, the cabinets, the toilet paper roll, then the kitchen. Nothing.
My second thought was that I was having an olfactory hallucination. Yep, that’s a real thing, called phantosmia, and it can be a sign of a neurodegenerative disease or other brain problems. That’s where my mind went.
My third thought was that one of the guests we had had over for dinner the night before had lit a match in the bathroom to eliminate, ahem, odor.
I just read the beautiful new Elizabeth Strout novel Tell Me Everything, a true “crossover episode” populated with characters from many of her previous books. There was one detail, to use a phrase that Strout employs frequently in the book, that “killed me.” The central character, anticipating a first visit to the apartment of his crush, slips a pack of matches into his wallet so that he can light one to disguise the smell if he poops in her bathroom. What a strange image – wouldn’t everyone smell the scent of fire, instead?
I stood there in my own home this weekend, bewildered, wondering if someone who had been at dinner had done that the night before.
Of course, the most obvious explanation was also the one that turned out to be true, and yet it was the last thing to dawn on me. There have been wildfires burning in New Jersey, spurred on by the longest stretch of dry weather the area has seen in years. The air outside was clogged with ash. The scent was strong in the bathroom, presumably because it seeped in through the plumbing. As soon as I stepped outside to take the dog for a walk, I realized what was going on.
We aren’t used to this in Pennsylvania. “I thought this area was supposed to be climate change resilient,” one of my neighbors texted, as we debated whether or not it was safe to take our kids outside.
Wildfires are the stuff of the West Coast — those hipper, more relevant and elite, more left-wing states. I thought having fewer natural disasters was our reward for living in a place that’s cheaper and less sexy. But climate change, like a lot of things, affects us all.
After the election last week, one of my co-workers turned to me and said, “Okay, I guess I won’t read the news for the next four years.”
I empathize – I truly do. I have been known to immediately turn off NPR in the car the moment Trump’s voice comes on the air. And my colleague’s comment brought up some genuine questions. Is it possible to ignore the effects of a second Trump presidency? Could my privilege extend that far, insulating me from the hateful things that are sure to come? Could I just hunker down, bake some bread, hug my kid, and tune out what was going on outside?
It certainly feels tempting. When I met with some medical students last week and I asked them how they were feeling, post-election, one of them said, “It feels like we’re pretending nothing happened.”
I share that feeling. I’ve felt strange bringing up the election with neighbors and colleagues, partly because I’m not sure how they voted. It turns out, unfortunately for everybody, that I live in a red state.
Online, hot takes about the election are the only thing filling my inbox. Every Substack I read – even the ones about fashion and fiction and cooking – has acknowledged the grief of Harris’ loss, a testament to how I only read left-wing stuff and how fractured our media consumption has become.
Then, IRL, we’re talking about everything but – Thanksgiving plans and what our kids dressed up as for Halloween. At the grocery store, when I ask the young woman checking me out how she’s doing, she says, “Oh I’m great. I get off in an hour.”
Over the last week, when I’ve alluded to the election in visits with my patients (“How are you doing, with everything that’s been going on this week?”) I usually get some version of this in response: Things were stressful before, they’re stressful now.
“How’s life?” I ask patients I haven’t seen in a while. “It’s life-ing,” they say.
I don’t think this real-life election-talk avoidance is just a desire to steer clear of conflict, although that’s part of it. It’s deeper. There’s a sense that the election changes nothing; it simply revealed who we were all along.
Nature chose a heavy-handed metaphor when my house filled up with wildfire smoke over the weekend. It was like she grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me, and screamed: You think you can wall yourself off and hide! You think you can avoid acknowledging that we are all interconnected. Sorry pal. This injustice – climate, gender, race, bodily autonomy – affects every single one of us! It’s all related, and there’s no escaping it.
This past week, I told myself I’d take a break from thinking about the election, focus on my community and relationships, but my sense of grief keeps bubbling up. I cried reading a Smitten Kitchen recipe, I cried doing an online strength training class when an instructor told me to “take care of myself,” I cried reading Elizabeth Strout (that one was obvious), and I also cried watching Encanto (that one was also obvious.)
I lost my sh*t with a truck parked in the crosswalk, an everyday occurrence in South Philly that is really annoying and dangerous and forces me to walk in the street with the stroller. I’m ashamed to admit I actually shouted “society is breaking down” to the poor Amazon delivery guy who was freaked out and also probably thinking, “It’s you people who keep ordering all this crap that forces me to park here.”
Turns out repressing all of my anxiety about the election isn’t so effective. The wildfire smoke will find a way in, and a Trump presidency will harm us all – even those of us with the privilege to turn off the news for four years. (Remember this guy? Ugh. And double ugh for writing about it. Classic “New York Times is on it.”)
Here are some things I’ve been thinking about:
Cooking for my friends and family.
Finally, truly, cutting the cord and not buying stuff on Amazon. I’ve been cutting way back over the last few years, partially motivated by the horrific stories of my many patients who work in New Jersey Amazon warehouses, partially motivated by nakedly corrupt moves like Jeff Bezos preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s not as hard as you think.
Upping my monthly donation to the Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania.
Really, truly, always trying to do right by my patients. Health care is a mess, but kindness and care still matter.
Exploring different volunteer and community building activities that I can do with my three-year-old kid. I loved this piece by
for Vox about why she changed her mind about volunteering, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot in the context of parenting. We’ve done some park cleanups and food pantry donating together, and I’m curious to hear suggestions from other parents.Reading. Always reading.
And walking.
Rethinking what climate activism looks like in my life. This always feels so difficult, because the problem seems so vast, and individual action can feel so pathetically small and, frankly, self-righteous. I’ve been reading What If We Get It Right? by
, and feel energized by the examples she shares of what our collective climate future might look like.Rewriting my book proposal — again! I’m in the early, early stages of a book project about what I’m calling body justice, and sometimes it feels easier to give up than to press forward. Who cares about fatphobia in health care? I wonder sometimes, when we’re faced with such huge-scale disasters. But then I remember: all of this work is connected. Body justice is connected to body autonomy, which is connected to both freedom and community. All of this work matters.
So I’m curious to hear: What’s the way forward, for you?
I just quit Amazon too! I'm about a month in and it feels really good.
I also decided I'm going to work on making my little backyard more green and inviting, so it's more of a retreat for me and a better place to have friends over. Community feels important right now.