Hypochondriac.

Dated 14 October 2009 in an old notebook.

I am not, in the strictest sense, a true hypchondriac. I have no taste for the calamity of grave disease, no sense that cancer is always lurking like a mugger just around the corner or that AIDS may attempt to breach my defenses at any moment. I ride the subway without undue anxiety, though it does occasionally cross my mind that the handles are probably virtual cesspools of bacteria. I get vaccinations with none of the irrational worry that I’ve seen grip people — people I know — at the possibility of being injected with a virus, even a dead one. My body contains a variety of minor lumps, cuts, and deformities that worry me not at all. See? I’m not paranoid about my health.

But I do have, and have had since childhood, an unconscious tendency to exaggerate my minor illnesses far beyond their true scope. Do me any real harm, and I’ll ignore it — I’ve run on pulled muscles, written with sprained thumbs, gone years without getting a chipped tooth fixed — but give me a minor symptom, a sniffle, a headache, the politest of little coughs, and the next thing you know I’m in the bathtub with the vapo-rub and calling my mother for moral support. I suspect that this is rooted in a childhood discovery that major defects result in trips to the doctor and being told you can’t play baseball, while something minor allows one to stay home from school and watch Family Ties without any of the fuss or bother. I gamed this out fairly effectively as a kid, conjuring a cold from every sniffle and strep from every scratchy throat, but by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I’d overplayed my hand, and my parents had wised up. Every time I even mentioned the possibility that I was sick, my mom offered to take me to the doctor to have it checked out. It was a fairly simple gambler’s trick — calling an inveterate bluffer’s heavy bet — but it seemed devilishly clever to me at the time, the way all effective parenting strategies do until you’re about fourteen.

I’m sick-ish today. I was sick-ish yesterday, too, and skipped class, telling myself that I didn’t want to spread contagions to an unsuspecting group of graduate students who could ill-afford to be laid up. In truth, I didn’t really feel that awful: My sinuses were a little parched, swallowing didn’t feel so good, and I ejected the occasional bronchial cough, bringing with it just the slightest hint of lung detritus. But I contrived to be elaborately tired and bored all day, which could be signs that illness was preventing me from doing the many wonderful things I would otherwise have got up to (like going down to Target to buy a broom, or reading 120 pages of deconstructionist literary theory — blah), but when you think about it, they could also be signs of laziness and inconstancy. That’s the thing. When I’m doing this to myself, it’s hard for me to tell.

The problem is that now, I’m in charge of myself, and my mom lives 3000 miles away, so she can’t threaten to haul me in to see the doctor if my malaise is more a symptom of not wanting to do my homework than of any catastrophic illness. These kinds of decisions have to be made on the fly, and by me, and I’m discovering that that’s a recipe for habitual dereliction of duty. I mean, it would be one thing if I was skipping class so I could get stoned and listen to Steve Martin records with my friends, which is what I used to do in college. But I’m sick, right? I don’t want to make it worse, do I? I don’t want to spread disease, am I right or am I right? Right? Right?

So I woke up this morning, and I made an executive decision: if I’m going to miss class again, I have to go to the doctor. It turns out that a lot of this business of being an adult entails an element of being your own mother: You have to ground yourself if you misbehave. You have to make yourself go to bed on time. And if you’re going to bail out because you’re not feeling so hot, you have to look yourself sternly in the eye, and say, All right, Mister, if you’re so sick let’s just go to the doctor and have it checked out.

But I swear, I really am sick!