I'm on the BART in Berkeley minding my own when street people offer me food and money. These are the times you realize you're in worse shape than you'd understood.

At home in the mirror for the first time in probably a year. Hair lank, unwashed for weeks. Eyes red, insomnia. Unshaved, stubble mixing black with white into a tired shade of no-color. Skin the same gray no-color as the stubble, which blends in. He looks haggard, obviously. But also afraid.

These are the somatic indicators. Or some of them. That you're not tending to your body, because it wouldn't occur to you to consider that important.


It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.
It made me tired just to think of it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Harper Perennial 2005 (p.128)