There is something rather delicious about hubris. For those of us who live a life of extremes — the kind of life that convinces the rest of the world that their mediocrity is the sensbile option — the sensation of feeling greater than the gods is compensation enough for the pain, humiliation and wretchedness that follows it.
This summer I have been loudly proclaiming — with fewer and fewer caveats — that I have cured myself of hayfever using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and mindfulness meditation. Traditionally, allergies have been seen as being purely physical phenomena where the body reacts violently to harmless types of pollen and other specks of matter. Yet, after reading this article by Robert Dilts, I became conviced that it was possible to become ‘dissociated’ from your allergy.
On Saturday night, after a completely sneeze-free Spring, I explained to Tom and Jess that hayfever was obviously psychosomatic. I mentioned the case of a woman allergic roses who walked into her Doctor’s surgery and had a sneezing fit after noticing he had a rose on his desk, despite it being a fake. I mentioned that my sister got hayfever after the birth of my nephew and that my Dad mysteriously stopped having hayfever after he mellowed into old age. Who could doubt I was right after listening to my collection of scientific Lancet-approved anecdotes!
I leaned back in my chair and smiled contentedly. How relieved I was to be free of this soggy tissued burden! Tom quibbled that surely the main counter-argument to the idea that it’s psychosomatic is the experience of very young children who suffer from allergies? Was I arguing that they are victims of trauma? Yes, reader, I was. Indeed, now I think back to my school days, was there not a correlation between anxious children and allergies? Ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
So imagine my horror when I awoke at 6am on Sunday morning with the ticklish sensation of full-blown hayfever. I tried meditation, I tried dissociation, I went to a room where the sun never shines and the windows are never opened, but it was no use. Reader, I sneezed. Then I sneezed again. And again and again and again and again. I tried to clear the tears from my eyes but only succeeding in rubbing them raw. I was deflated and depressed.
The trouble with emphasising the psychological aspects of your maladies is that the more you suffer, the more you are likely to blame yourself. What seems like the wresting of control into your own hands can become self-flagellation.
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Postscript
Despite the evidence to the contrary, I am still convinced that hayfever is a product of the mind. Last Sunday morning I was hungover, tired and a little stressed - no wonder I exploded with snot. Since getting a decent sleep and cutting out the sauce, I have barely had a sniffle.
Haha. Brilliant.
A fable I’ll be telling my children! What could be more interesting is my in-and-of-itself-unusual-for-such-a-reasonable-man inability/refusal to blame myself for my panic attack-inducing anxiety disorder. Sadly for health reasons I can’t venture too far into introspection with that.
I’ll say this though: the low-intensity reflexiveness and/or cumulative itch/scratch factor of various hayfever symptoms – sneezing, raw eyes, snot, skin rashes – are deceptively easy to prevent with a little mindfulness.
Something that pissed me off no end as a kid was the girl next to me in form’s habit of sneezing exclusively in multiples. Whenever she sneezed, there would be at least two more coming in short succession. I was the sweetest thing in the world at the time and fancied her no end, but still whenever this happened I would go into a quiet shaking rage: Just fucking stop it. I can’t help it! she’d say, and that’s incontestable and believable enough, BUT I MAINTAIN SHE STILL CAN, IF SHE ONLY BELIEVED SHE COULD.