Maybe It's the Altitude

You’d think sleeping in paradise would come easy. Or maybe that’s me. I thought sleeping more soundly this week was a given, since I’m in a stunning place with my two kids and an awesome group of people, getting a break from the insanity that is the United States right now. Given that I’m getting up early, teaching two yoga classes a day, walking miles in this picturesque town with its cobblestones and considerable hills, seeing all the sights there are to see, and eating all the food there is to eat.

We’d all be wrong - any of us who thought I’d be sleeping, but I’ll get back to that.

Normally I’d be in Santa Monica right now, writing to you from my den if it was most days. At the moment I’m sitting on my bed, or what I’m calling “my bed” for a week while I lead a yoga retreat in San Miguel de Allende.

Everyone here has been on multiple retreats with me so it’s like family, except for Marcy’s new fiancé who passed muster thank god for him. I’d hate to think what would have happened otherwise but it wouldn’t have been pretty. He has no idea. Happy to say now James is family, too.

The venue is ridiculous, I found this insane place with a rooftop that has views I don’t even understand, stone walls, high ceilings - it’s like something out of House and Garden except you could see yourself actually living here, whereas I can never see myself living in those places in the architectural magazines. The couches always look uncomfortable to me, and it looks like you’d want to die if you broke something and god forbid you spilled.

It’s not like that here, but it’s just as incredible. You could grab a couple beers and go to the roof with your dog and write for hours, and it would be heaven. It's a couple of blocks from the heart of the city. We have in-home cooks - Javi and Maria - who are making such delicious meals. I don't know what’s going to happen when I go home and have to make something to eat. Guess I’ll just accept feeling like a failure and get on with it, we can’t all be great at everything. It’s fine.

We had a walking tour of Zona Centro Wednesday with a woman named Jalal who clearly loves her hometown - and she showed us the places the locals go. It wasn't one of those tours where facts start sliding off your brain ten minutes in because the person is just spitting out memorized events that you don’t really care about and will definitely not remember because they aren’t even going in the first time. We all have limited short-term memory chunks for chrissakes, someone should remind the tour guides. No one needs to remind Jalal, though. She even took us to the places with the clean bathrooms for bathroom breaks, where you only had to buy a coffee if you wanted one.

Thursday we went to a vineyard and everyone tried the wine but me because of my head. You don’t know what I’m talking about because I haven’t mentioned I’ve been plagued with headaches at night yet, because I edited this essay. In the first version I’d told you about my headaches already. Anyway, I didn’t taste the wine, but I did taste the grapes and they were so tart my mouth is still pursed. I like that feeling though, when you eat something like that, and your mouth does that thing it does when you suck on a lemon, and then your mouth waters a little?

Little fucker, packed a punch.

It was the most sour grape I’ve ever tasted, and probably the most sour thing, so I won’t ever forget it. Which is cool. It was also my mom’s birthday, or what would have been her birthday if she were still here, which she would have been if she didn’t get ALS. Which she probably wouldn’t have gotten if she hadn’t been an alcoholic for forty years, and gotten drunk enough to fall down and hit her head hard enough to have two black eyes at least four times in the last five years of her life. That’s called Sad Math if you were wondering. Falling down and hitting your head hard multiple times is a thing that can lead to ALS, especially if you never go to the doctor after you hit your head that hard. Anyway, I digress.

Every year since her death, I go to a vineyard on her birthday - somewhere amazing and far-flung, because I’m almost always leading a retreat the last week in June - and we toast her. The first year I was in Tuscany, that was 2022. Then Greece in 2023, and Portugal in 2024. It’s tradition now, and I think she’d like that. I never enabled her drinking when she was alive, but I guess this is my way of saying all is forgiven and here is a thing you enjoyed. I wish we could have done more things together that she found fun. I wish so many things. I took the tiniest sip a person can take because of my head, which has been problematic, I might have mentioned. I missed her the entire day, but I miss her every day.

I’ve been having a tough time with the altitude, or that’s what I think it is that’s causing my headaches. These aren’t just headaches, they’re painful vise grips of misery around my brain that make it impossible to sleep. I basically have a wrestling match with the mattress and pillows all night, trying and failing to find any position where my brain doesn’t hurt. Then the alarm goes off. It’s fucking fantastic. The altitude here is 6,234 feet above sea level. I know this because I looked it up when I wasn’t sleeping due to the agony. That’s when I decided to call this essay No Sleep for You, Fucker. When I told my friend Kate that’s what I was going to call it she said that’s the title of every woman over forty-five’s memoir, and yes haha, but I sleep at home.

Which is why I think it’s the altitude. I’m sensitive to that kind of thing. I can’t scuba dive, either, which sucks because you might not know this - there’s an entire universe below sea level. It’s like another planet, and it’s quiet and full of colors and creatures you’ve never seen unless you’ve been there. I got certified years ago, and the first time I went I could not believe what I was seeing. I was dumbfounded and I didn’t want to come back up. This was in the Bahamas, where you see coral reefs and sea turtles and stingrays and parrotfish, and the water is actually turquoise. I thought well, that’s it for me, I’m screwed because this is an expensive hobby, but how do you not spend all your free time down here? I’ll tell you how.

The change in pressure on the way up gave me the worst migraine I’ve ever had in my life. So bad, I only ever went scuba diving once after, just to see if it would happen again, and it did.

So it seems plausible that being several thousand feet above sea level would also screw with my head. So many things screw with my head. My son got bitten by a mosquito yesterday and a giant white welt blew up on the back of his hand and my first thought was oh my god, he’s going to get dengue fever. Hi, welcome to my brain, it is what it is. Then, because life will mess with you, we came back to the venue and he had stomach issues within hours and a raging fever. It’s bacteria no doubt. He ate something. Funny thing, here in Mexico, you can get a house call from a real live doctor in an hour for 850 pesos which is $45. Forty-five dollars. Yep. Anyway, I went to the pharmacy and filled the prescriptions and he’s feeling better.

But I’m sensitive and anxious and that’s nurture, not nature - I didn’t arrive this way. I grew up in an environment where I had to scan my surroundings for danger, so we can laugh about dengue fever, but I practice yoga for a reason. I have tools so I don’t drive myself or the people around me insane (most of the time). I teach because it’s helped me so much. If I didn’t have a practice, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.

My mom used to say I was sensitive like it was a bad thing. I’m pretty sure most of the time if someone says you’re sensitive, they don’t mean it as a compliment, but I’m thinking we should try to reclaim that word because the world could use more sensitive people instead of asshats who don’t care about anything. It kills me to see people treated badly. It keeps me up at night thinking of my friends feeling scared. I can’t believe the way we’re treating each other on this planet, it breaks my heart and I don’t mean that lightly.

So the altitude here is a real thing and it’s why the weather is so temperate year-round. It does get warmer in the summer months, but it’s never uncomfortably hot, and it’s cool at night. This week it’s been in the 70’s most days which has been great for walking around, and mid-50’s in the evenings. There are fireplaces in every room, and a couple of nights we’ve wanted them.

So maybe the nightly headaches are from the altitude, or it could also be that wherever you go, he’s still the president of the United States. I hope it isn’t that, because I’d like to believe I could give myself a little room to breathe for a week. I have had a couple of migraines - I was not surprised by the first one because it happened after a long day of travel which can be a trigger even if I hydrate and do everything right (file that under shitty things can happen to good people even when they do everything right - some people seem to have a really hard time grasping that). I had one the third night we were here, but I’ve had these other kind of headaches every night, and they aren’t mild.

As I’ve been tossing and turning and sometimes silently weeping from the desperation to sleep, I’ve gotten into thought spirals about the state of the world. If I were wide awake and not in pain, I’d be able to “pick my mind up” and choose a better thought, but at 4am when you’re exhausted and sleep-deprived and in pain, you start to lose it. One night, maybe last night, maybe the night before, I started thinking about this yoga teacher I’ve known for twenty-five years, and how I finally had to block her the other day.

She’s thrilled he bombed Iran (there’s only one person I can mean) and I just can’t, y’know? Like, how the fuck can you be a yoga teacher and be thrilled when innocent people are going to die? Or when an insane person who lies every time he opens his mouth is running the country from his social media account like a petulant racist kid who never heard the word no from anyone but his dad, and has a chip on his shoulder the size of Atlantic City? Why would anyone believe anything he says anymore about anything?

Anyway I tried to unfriend her, but the wifi here is spotty, so it didn’t look like it worked, so I hit unfriend again, but then it sent her a friend request because it had worked the first time. Which is kind of hilarious, but also the last thing I wanted because now she’ll know I unfriended her (which is fine, I don’t give a shit even though I said NOOOO out loud, hahaha), but I definitely do not want to be friends on social media or anywhere else anymore. I haven’t seen her in person for at least fifteen years, this is not going to be any kind of gaping hole in my life. So I blocked her.

Now I won’t have to see the other yoga teacher in her comments who I blocked a long time ago who also likes the president and is a misogynist himself, and says things like, Daddy Trump is fixing it all. Please choose your yoga teachers carefully. And women, if an adjustment feels “off” trust your gut. If you have a crush on your male yoga teacher and he’s flirting with you and everyone else that’s not a good sign. Don’t take advice from men about women’s issues. So strange the things you need to say sometimes.

Blech, I’m so sick of institutionalized fuckery and how it’s everywhere and the men who benefit are running the government. Can’t we please be done with these he-man woman-haters already? Aren’t we tired of this chest-beating bullshit that is the weakest form of manliness in existence? They’re going to kill us all if we don’t stop tolerating this, let alone voting for it. They aren’t real. They’re scared, weak and angry, and they need to go home. They’ve used up their chances, they don’t know how to do this. They’ve had over four hundred years to prove it. That part they’ve done really well.

Then one guy who isn’t like that at all, a guy who has only had good things to say about the other guys running for the same position he’d like to win, a guy in New York City - gets a leg up and stuns everyone, and all these people who vote for more institutionalized fuckery are like oh hell no. We can’t have a guy in NYC who wants to make the subways affordable are you fucking kidding me? A guy who wants to freeze rent-stabilized apartments and build more affordable housing? Screw him, the gall. Who wants a mayor who cares about tenants?

Did someone say Department of Community Safety? Hang on a second. That sounds a lot like caring about people. Is this guy suggesting New York City invests in mental health programs and crisis support, and something called “evidence-based gun violence prevention programs”?

Free and faster buses? Wait just a minute there, sir, not so fucking fast. People in NYC like to get there slowly. Apparently. Although not when I lived there until I was twenty-nine years old, and not when I visit multiple times a year, and not ever, on any day ever in life. What’s this about city-owned grocery stores that don’t pay rent? Sounds like some of that fishy democratic socialism stuff where people might actually be able to afford groceries. That’s not how we do things! New York City is known for its outrageously high cost of living, Mr. Mamdani! What exactly are you trying to do?

It’s the first sign of life I’ve seen in a while. The first genuine push-back against the current regime, the first indication that people are rising up and saying no to this fascist, lame, played-out, violent, pathetic, blow-the-world-up, seen-this-film-before, me Tarzan, you Jane BS - and coming up with a much better vision. I’m in.

So anyway, maybe I’ll sleep tonight. I bought NyQuil, or at least I think that’s what it is, it’s in Spanish. I’m gonna take one. Maybe I needed to write an essay, maybe the headache has been too many thoughts buzzing around in my head. Maybe I just missed you. Maybe it’s the altitude.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot…

Carl Sagan

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