Body Language

I
Sloane sat at her little desk, an open notebook before her, and waited for the drugs to kick in.

This was research, not recreation. As a therapist, Sloane was interested in the decades of data showing the success of psychedelics in addressing post-­traumatic stress disorder. Magic mushrooms and LSD had been used to treat depression, as well as the fear and anxiety experienced by people coping with terminal illness. They might be similarly helpful for those given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And what about menopause transition?

Sloane would be attending a weeklong workshop in the fall, to learn how to guide others through a psychedelic experience. In the meantime she was conducting a few experiments on herself with help from Jeff, her microbiologist friend who grew and prepared mushrooms, and a book called Sacred Spores: A Psychedelic Guide to the Divine Feminine.

Both Sacred Spores and Jeff emphasized the importance of “set and setting.” This meant making sure you were in a good mental place, and in safe and pleasant physical surroundings. People who took a full dose of mushrooms tended to experience a dissolution of self or ego and often had communications with God, or ancestors, or themselves in utero, things for which you wanted a nice pillow and good lighting. On the other end of the spectrum, a microdose might simply help with mood or anxiety.

Sloane had swallowed one gram of dried mushrooms, which Jeff packaged in little capsules. Sacred Spores called one gram a “Creativity Level.” She would notice it: colors might be enhanced, cyclical thought patterns disrupted, or new perspectives unleashed, but she’d be able to do normal activities safely.

“Set” was short for “mindset” and Sloane’s mindset was good. Only two clients today, but gratifying ones. Dennis, her Afghanistan war veteran, had first come to her saying he hated “woo-­woo California crap, no offense” and was “kind of over therapy in general” and had made the appointment only because his wife issued an ultimatum. Sloane had made space for his skepticism. She too had been raised with the idea that therapy was either for outright wackos or self-­indulgent types who had money and self-­importance enough to waste focusing on themselves, instead of just getting on with it, like regular people.

The trouble with the “just getting on with it” method, Sloane felt, was how badly most people did it. How much they hurt themselves and the people closest to them by shutting down or off. Sloane, thrifty child of the Midwest, would add that masking, deflecting, or projecting one’s trauma, fear, shame, and pain wasn’t, in the end, good value!

She had gently led Dennis to his own discoveries. Today, he’d made a connection between his back pain and poor communication with his father. He had used the word journey.

After Dennis, there had been Hannah, her twenty-­five-­year-­old client who experienced chronic constipation, insomnia, migraines, anxiety, occasional panic attacks, and heavy periods. “I know these aren’t really problems,” she’d said at their first session. (Her doctor’s recommendation had been that Hannah should eat more fiber.)

Hannah was an actress and, in addition to more traditional therapy sessions, Sloane sometimes coached her for auditions. Working as a voice, speech, and audition coach was valuable income and there was quite a lot of overlap in trauma therapy and working with actors.

(Sloane herself had gone to Carnegie Mellon as a theater major and then on to New York for many years, and although she’d twice been able to quit bartending for understudy gigs on Broadway, it was hard for her to get well-­paying theater jobs, partly, perhaps, because she hadn’t done television or film and wasn’t a “name,” so after playing a friendly nurse on Guiding Light and a sassy friend of a dead girl on Law & Order, she’d moved to Los Angeles, and along with becoming the voice of all the Honey Maid Graham Cracker commercials for several years, she’d gotten fairly steady work playing about fifty variations of Nurse or Sassy Friend, as well as Teacher, Mom, Pathologist, and member of a threatened race on Star Trek, and reflecting on her acting career usually manifested in a mixed sense of pride and shame and amusement and anger that made Sloane tense the scalene muscles in her neck, and by God she never wished to be in her twenties—­or thirties—­again.)

Today, after Sloane coached Hannah through a series of somatic exercises, Hannah had discharged a lot of trapped energy from her throat. It had been exciting to watch the physical transformation: shoulders rolling back, tension smoothing off the forehead, a healthy flush coming to the cheeks. Hannah started laughing with relief, and then burst into song. Sloane was still glowing from the session. An excellent mindset.

As for setting, Sloane had decided to do the mushrooms at her office, which she greatly preferred to her apartment. The office was an additional dwelling unit belonging to her dear friends Daria and Michaela, for whom Sloane also provided cat-­sitting and massage services, because they were so generous about rent. (The kindness of women friends. Men friends too, by which Sloane meant her gay male friends. Anyway, of community, of support.)

“Make the place your own,” Daria and Michaela had urged. Sloane had not gone in for any spiritual doodads. No dreamcatchers or chakra charts. No inspirational quotes or photos of Indigenous women doing humble acts in a state of grace. Sloane took deep, physical pleasure in the uninterrupted cream color of the walls; she did not have to take mushrooms to want to caress them.

Her own apartment felt oppressively cluttered these days, no matter how many times she tried to organize with the latest method. She’d filled boxes with donations and set cleaning timers and asked herself if her possessions sparked joy, and still ended up in a rage over the tyranny of partially used wrapping paper tubes or what seemed like five hundred million cords.

“It’s a perimenopause thing,” her friend Angelica said. “I just got rid of all my throw pillows.”

Sloane’s friend Julia could no longer tolerate clothing with prints and patterns. “Is it menopause or internalized ageism?” Julia asked. “I’m terrified of becoming one of those kooky women who wears ‘interesting’ pants. I just want one loose but also severe and sort of menacing garment.”

Sloane thought she knew what Julia meant about the pants. It had to do with power. Being seen as a sexual object made you vulnerable in some ways, but so did not being seen as a sexual object. Power. Being Seen. A good theme for contemplation.

Was she high? Sloane didn’t want to be too high. She decided to try a little breath work. She stood. She felt a desire to touch her face, and with it a reflexive prohibition against touching her face. It will cause breakouts! It will create wrinkles! Women were bullied and besieged about their faces, constantly instructed to fight or fix their own skin, a war now being sold to them under the guise of “self-­care.”

The pressure had been worse when she was acting, even though she’d technically been a “character” actor. At thirty-­five, Sloane had been cast to play the mom of an actress who was twenty-­seven. The younger actress confessed to getting Botox, still fairly new on the market at that point. “Do you know about it? They say it’s good to start early. Like training your muscles, only in reverse.”

Sloane’d had acne, as a teenager. Oxy pads and Sea Breeze Astringent. Foundation thick as glue and never quite the right shade. Her mother saying, crossly, Don’t pick. The struggle throughout her careless twenties, casual bad habits, falling asleep with makeup still on, Estée Lauder concealer shoplifted from Barneys. The move to Los Angeles and learning to hold her face still for the camera because on camera her face was “too much.” Marriage and good products on the Hers side of a His-­and-­Hers bathroom. The products legitimately purchased, a life that felt increasingly less so. Divorce and grad school and creating her own business and now her face had lines and occasional breakouts, and she needed to get out her reading glasses to decipher the words “age-­defying,” but she was fifty and by God she would touch her own damn face.

Sloane realized she had forgotten to write down the exact time she’d taken the mushrooms. Perimenopausal brain fog was a real thing, though like nearly every other perimenopausal symptom it was tricky to distinguish from about a hundred other medical conditions or a general response to being alive now. Also, there were problems with publicly claiming “brain fog.” Women had needed to prove they could have their periods, or not have their periods, and fly planes, perform surgeries, run governments. They still had to do this. Most men did not want to know all the jobs they’d claimed first could be done while in a hormonal full body sweat, or bleeding out the vagina.

But how nice it would be if, during certain discrete phases of a woman’s life, women could give themselves permission to only do a task, like men let themselves only do a task, instead of doing the task and every other thing and carrying everyone’s emotional water as well. “I have brain fog,” said a woman, when she forgot one of forty things she needed to do.

Sloane placed her yoga mat in the center of her studio and stretched out. She touched her face, with love. She put a hand on her vagina and sent her vagina some love too. So much work, these places had to do, so much protection they needed. And all that work and protection cost money and time. Sloane’s chest expanded with empathy for her sisters across the world. The work of women. Armoring and budgeting everything. Armoring and budgeting the self.

Sloane moved her hands to her lower abdomen. She’d not gotten her period in five months and been celibate for almost two years. Her reproductive organs were retiring and should get a service award, or a non-­service award, really. Sloane tried to picture them. The arrangement of uterus, uterine tubes, cervix, ovaries had always made her think of a sheep skull. A Georgia O’Keeffe? Something lovely, but not exactly alive.