Dengue, robberies, and watching out for the second arrow

Beginning again

The Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. Photo by Jorge.

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The first night I spent in Mexico City, I was driven around in circles by an opportunistic cab driver and nearly robbed. An idiotic twenty-two year old, I had bought the cheapest possible ticket that landed me in that megacity at 2 am.

I spoke no Spanish. I was alone. These are the kinds of things I am now 1000% percent sure my own child will do to cause me agony.

I opened the door of the moving taxi and screamed, and that did it. The driver stopped, I got out, I found a hotel, and I spent the night crying to the rasp of an ancient air conditioner.

That ended up being a trip that would change my life. I fell in love with Latin America. I met people who’d been traveling for months, years. I came to believe in travel as a way of life, an ethos. I came home, worked, saved up, bought a one-way ticket to Lima, Peru, and took off.

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When Jorge, Elena and I landed in Oaxaca last month for Jorge’s fellowship project, we immediately realized we’d arrived in the middle of a massive dengue epidemic.

Dengue is a constant threat in Oaxaca, and basically any place on the planet except for Europe, the U.S., and the freezing poles. In all likelihood, it’ll be common in North America within the next twenty years.

It can be very serious and is always on our radar, especially since I got quite ill with it in 2014, just after Elena was born. Dengue has four strains, and once you’ve had one, you’re immune to it but more vulnerable to the others. Subsequent infections tend to be move severe.

After I’d had it, I went through a period of intense paranoia, thinking I would never again visit a warm country. Then, gradually, I got used to living with the threat, applying repellent – which I almost never do in the U.S. – to my bare limbs and wearing long pants whenever the mosquitos seemed bad.

But neither Jorge or I had ever experienced anything like the levels of dengue we saw in Oaxaca this year. Nearly everyone we knew had recently had it or knew someone who had. The hospitals were overflowing. The state reported that dengue was up 500% compared to the previous year: the result of freakish drought conditions followed by extreme rains.

We spent a few days in intense stress. Should we fly home? We couldn’t afford to and we needed to do our work. We spent one particularly desperate evening quarantined in the hotel room, all the windows sealed tight, eating nachos and despondently watching Looney Tunes on Netflix.

And then, we moved on. We went out only fully covered: pants, long socks, long sleeves, and about a gallon and a half of Off! each (this for someone who will only ever spray her garden or clean her bathtub with apple cider vinegar).

We visited beloved friends. Jorge took gorgeous photos. We hiked the forest we love on my birthday. We sat on a rock above the soaring pines of the Sierra and listened to the crickets.

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The Buddhist parable of two arrows holds that a person suffers twice: with the pain and shock of getting hit by the first arrow, then with the second arrow of her reaction.

Oftentimes, the second arrow – anger, rage, denial, grief, stories about how this cycle always repeats, stuckness – is worse than the first.

We cannot choose the first, but we can – with great difficulty and practice – chose the second.

I have waited for the last ten years for my anxiety to go away. I want it to just go away. But as I wrote earlier this year, the opposite of fear isn’t fearlessness: it’s purpose.

The fear will be there. It will pop up, oftentimes in unexpected circumstances. Sometimes, it will ruin my day. It will take me down.

In the past, I would let this become the narrative: I can’t best this thing. I can’t do it. I give up. Despair.

Then, afterwards, I would develop a fierce determination to somehow cure it, heal it.

Now, a little bit more – not completely, by any means, maybe not even most of the time, but sometimes – I can say, okay, there was that. There was the fear. And now, I begin again.

Now, I try and recognize and reject that second arrow, and I keep going. Buy another can of Off! Get on the next plane. Keep going, because it’s the purpose that will ultimately diminish the fear.

Not banish it, not create a carefree life of whimsy, but let it be just one part of a big whole that includes risk, wildness, joy, adventure, and beauty, as well as that familiar gut-punch of worry.

It is this I try to teach Elena. One of her favorite stories now is how she almost – almost! – swam with wild dolphins after years of saying this was her #1 wish. She didn’t ultimately swim with them because the second she jumped in the ocean and saw fins around her she screamed “LET ME BACK IN THE BOAT!”

This could be something shameful and hidden. But instead, she’s made it a funny story, whose punch line is: next time.

Next time, I’ll do it. That’s all you can do, because the alternative is to marinate in that regret, in self-loathing, and to write the story of yourself as I didn’t.

I did it anyway. That’s the line I’m leaning into in my forties: I was worried, I was scared, I didn’t anticipate this, I can’t control it and – I did it anyway. That’s how you begin again, and again, and again. In writing, in art, in life.

You watch all the Looney Tunes, you worry, you despise yourself, and then in the morning you take a DEET bath and you go out and you do it anyway, because you want to live sitting on friends’ porches and watching cerulean flycatchers at sunset and you want to love people and you want to be in the world badly enough that you carry the fear with you like a dark stone, like one more part of the night with its dogs and kids and birds and sky and music filtering tinny from the kitchen, worrying it with your fingers from time to time between fried peanuts and beer,

beginning again,

and again,

and again.