A Series of Tubes

At roughly 11:30am on a Monday, I turn my body in my office chair to stand and become confronted by the reality that the weekend has caught up with me. It’s the previous weekend, to be specific, but it’s nothing like the hulking monster weekends of my youth. The ones I’d have to carry around with me for half the day before they finally disembarked from my body and mind and allowed my thoughts to clear and my muscles to expel energy effectively. No, this one is insidious because there was no dancing with the forces of drink and darkness into the wee hours; there has been nothing of that sort for a long time. This was a weekend of fun and friends and family and roughly three glasses of wine per evening for three nights straight… and now I know I’m in no shape to handle that any longer. “The tubes have spoken,” I whisper as I look into my office's bathroom mirror and steel myself for another wave of exhaustion despite 8-hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I am transported in my mind to the crinkling paper seat of a doctor’s office, six weeks after having given birth to my daughter, as the doctor draws a rough sketch on a whiteboard of how the bile duct that connected to my gallbladder would be rerouted to empty directly into my stomach once the offending organ was removed in a few weeks time. I must have cringed because he asked me what I was thinking and I let him know it seemed odd to connect something to my stomach that hadn’t been there before. Would this cause digestive problems? Could I expect acid reflux? What if it didn’t heal the way it should? Would I know? And this man told me something calmly and kindly that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my days. “I see your concern, but you’re overthinking what your body can get used to. Ultimately, we’re just a series of tubes and as long as the tube has something to connect to and a place to empty it’ll just figure out the rest. Trust the tubes.”

Trusting the tubes has never been my strong suit, I’ll admit. Every skipped heartbeat or funky bruise leads me down a momentary corridor of internal horror at just how easily a body can turn on the person who owns it if not cared for in the exactly correct way. But then I remember our tubal system is built to bend, break, and mend. The tubes do not demand perfection of us, it’s us who demand perfection, unfairly, of them. How many of us are hauling abandoned waterpark tube slides around with us because we refuse to accept that our physical makeup should be as uncomplicated and compliant as a bendy straw? I know there are certainly days that I am doing just that when I should open my eyes, take pride in the perhaps simpler-than-it-seems superhighway of my physical makeup, and make myself the owner of the best damn waterpark tube slide this county has ever seen.

Instead, though, I’ve found that having this frame of mind helps me to get back to basics. There is so much we have to be, as people, members of society, parents, students, adults, siblings, friends that one can turn their mind over endlessly trying to cling to the things that make us who we are. I’m a mother, a woman, an employee, a friend, a wife, a reader, a person who is trying, a person who is failing, a person who is succeeding, a planted seed, a thirty-something, an anxious mess, no wait - a badass b*tch, no wait - a fraud, no wait - a creative, no wait - a businessperson… Sometimes it’s helpful to stop and think, what I am, really, is a series of tubes.

I’m just a series of tubes walking around, trying to find balance, order, excitement, fulfillment, and understanding in my day-to-day alongside myriad other series of tubes. We’re all trying to define and like ourselves by fitting affixing labels to who we are and what we’re doing when what we’re really doing is hauling the forgotten tube slides of our selves along with us and allowing them to adapt behind the scenes; quietly, efficiently, necessarily. Like all things human, it’s that simple and it’s that complicated. From the neural tube that lays our foundation to the estimated 10 billion (with a “B”) capillaries that work in tandem with the greater tubal network to sustain us at any given moment, I’m resigned to the idea that when the tubes speak, I damn well better be listening.