I, Misinformer: How we get things wrong
I’m in Nebraska and I’m having a psychedelic experience.
I’ll explain. But first we have to go back to February of last year, when I got Covid on a flight home from San Francisco.
One night soon after I’d unpacked, I turned on the gas stove and tossed some garlic in a little olive oil on the cast iron—one of the most powerful, comforting, delicious, recognizable aromas in the world, right? The total fact that I couldn’t smell it at all hit me like a wall of nothing. I just stood there saying, “Ahh!” for a minute, then I kind of ran around the room in a circle waving my arms. The garlic burned on the fire and no one was there to tell me.
I ended up without smell and taste completely for two weeks, before they reached back up to “about 30% smellopower,” as I began hilariously saying. Then, starting to feel much better but without my senses fully back, I moved from the plains up into the mountains at the end of March. Pretty high up. 7,000 feet high.
Over a year later, I meet my friends out on the mesa for a hike to the gorge, and they shout about the newly blooming sage all around us before I get a chance to register this incredible sign of spring. “I never got my smell back after I had Covid last year! So crazy, I have like 30% haha!” That fall, I’d had to ask a neighbor if I needed to take my dogs to the groomer’s after they tore the neck out of a young skunk. “I had Covid and never got my smell all the way back! Can you smell my dogs, is it bad? Haha!” Thanks, by the way, Kim.
For over a year, not once did I question the story that Covid was behind this loss. It didn’t bother me, I wasn’t having big feelings at all, but I mentioned it when it came up, I thought it was a good story, and I figured it was forever. Just one of those things!
And lo.
I’ve come down about seven thousand feet, traveling back East, and as I’m stopping in Nebraska, watching “The Michael Scott Paper Company” episode because one of my clients is using a storyline from it in his book, and because the Pam-Ryan dynamic is my favorite in the series, I open a glass thing of cut peppers I brought and a little thing of hummus and some pita and I immediately get the impression that I’ve been dosed.
The pita has a smell when I open it up, one that’s familiar but not recognizable, too complex, and my first thought is to check it for mold, but it’s fine. The bell pepper tastes orange, I think, like Diane Lane writes in her little postcard in Under the Tuscan Sun (real ones will know). The intensity of these simple, everyday flavors was one thing, but the textures were completely different from what I was prepared for, too—the bread felt grimy, the peppers crunched to the left. I can only describe the sensations as loud. How did I end up on acid this time?
Alright, I’m betting that some of you picked up on what’s happening about three paragraphs ago. I haven’t been dosed in this suburban basement in the middle of Nebraska, and I haven’t suddenly recovered from the effects of long Covid. While laughing insanely, I have a moment of clarity: I’d probably heard on a podcast that people crave certain drinks on airplanes, and most food tastes bland in the sky, because taste is affected at altitude. I knew that. The question to Google is obvious: “taste smell affected altitude how.” Lo.
Humidity and air pressure dull your smell and taste sensitivity as they decrease—including sensitivity to textures, as I’m experiencing. The higher you get from sea level, the lower the humidity and air pressure. Now that I had come down to the plains, I got those senses back. Covid did not permanently change my senses of smell and taste, I was just experiencing the effects of the altitude change and hadn’t adjusted. I also remember that when I moved, it was the beginning of a difficult and tragic fire season in the region—I had experienced the effects of fire season on taste and smell when I lived in the West previously, in a northerly region of the Rockies that reached a little over 3,000 feet.
And, as I read up on it a little more, I learn that part of the reason airplanes dull your smell (which dulls your taste further) is because of the noise of the engine, which affects part of your brain called the chonda tympani (free band name idea), a nerve that connects the taste buds to the ear (🙆🏻♀️). So I have another question to ask. If sound on a plane also contributes to decreased sensitivity, would tinnitus have an affect? I’d begun experiencing tinnitus in the last few months. Lo. The ringing in your ears has a strong correlation with “decreased olfactory sensitivity,” aka smellopower.
I’d come to a thin conclusion—Covid caused me to lose a lot of my taste and smell—and stuck to it for over a year, when in fact a lot of other stuff was going on that could have explained my symptoms, multiple stories that were intersecting. I did lose tase and smell when I had Covid, and after a few weeks they began to come back—but by then, I had moved 6,300 feet up in altitude, more than enough of a change to significantly affect me. My baseline senses had changed, and the fires and possibly some of the tinnitus that followed had an affect as well.
Ok, so what have we learned? This isn’t about how this particular thin conclusion was holding me back from living my life—this wasn’t a big deal to me. But it was a false story I’d been unknowingly telling, to myself and others, only because I hadn’t been curious enough to question my first guess—to revisit my free write or first draft of the story. I hadn’t practiced a writer’s curiosity.
This is just a small example of the much larger, more important and central stories I am asking you in this newsletter to get curious about, examine, and retell. Though the stakes in this case were very low, very often, a lack of curiosity can have consequences. Remembering to be curious is part of our practice of writing.
Seeking Thin Conclusions
This week, I recommend looking for opportunities where you tell yourself small stories, to help you practice how to see in this curious way of the writer.
This will help you practice the key trait of curiosity, work up to identifying bigger stories that need to be examined and rewritten, and it will help you hone your ability to find great topics to write about.
You can seek these small false or incomplete stories through awareness of your preferences, labels, and assumptions, the many small ways you rely on thin conclusions every day.
Preferences are a great beginner level to engage with, because the consequences of perceived preference usually aren’t very big. So if you say, “I don’t like X,” or “Y is my favorite Z,” cross-examine these conclusions. Is this most certainly so? Is there any chance it could be otherwise? When did you start saying you “hate X” or “only like Y,” and under what circumstances? Food, clothing, the kinds of books you read or movies you watch, are all great places to start looking for small stories to get curious about.
Labels are usually thin conclusions we’ve held onto for a long time, that trap us into patterns of behavior. Labels are usually negative, and negative labels stifle, restrain, and constrict the story of the self. Whenever you say or think, “I am X” (lazy, a perfectionist, quick to anger, too sensitive), allow yourself just a moment of space—some doubt about the truth of the conclusion. In that space, cross-examine the conclusion the label implies. Is this most certainly so? When did I start saying this? Is there any chance it could be otherwise? Begin to seek out, with curiosity, what may be thin conclusions you have about who you are.
Assumptions are thin conclusions about the world that keep our egos intact. Moving from assumptions to beliefs is built into a good writing process, so practice your ability to spot the assumptions you’re making, get curious about them, investigate them, and turn them into something richer and teeming with complicated truth. Start small with assumptions like my Covid story, where you went with your first guess about how something works, what happened, or what someone wants or meant. Try to find just one this week you can revisit and rewrite.
It can be exciting once you start getting curious about all the thin conclusions you’ve been unconsciously acting on, and getting into the practice of open-eyed curiosity will help you find the things you really want to write about, and help you unpack and reauthor the big stories of your life.
So don’t fear recognition of small lies—delight in them.
When you catch yourself acting stubborn about someone else making plans, pause and ask yourself if you’re really as inflexible as you tell yourself you are—if you want to, try making a different choice, you won’t stop existing. Don’t grieve the years you didn’t have Taylor Swift in your life because you assumed it wasn’t your thing. Rejoice that you now have a happier ending.
Happy writing!
