My Theory of Everything

What I learned about almost losing a piece of myself

“Beyond the Island and the Clouds” © Martha Nichols

Recently, the only file that contained revisions to my novel went missing. That might not sound as dire as it seemed, but I’ve been working on this novel for years. That one file contained months of changes and new additions, and it had somehow disappeared on my laptop. I burst into tears, shook fists at the universe (in this case, my computer and “the cloud”). I didn’t think I could reconstruct it all again.

It’s a message from God — just one of many fatalistic things I told myself, pausing between wringing hands and googling how to recover a lost file — I’m not meant to finish this, it was my last chance, and it’s gone, and now I have proof: I’m a failure.

I won’t drag out the suspense: I did get the file back. The near loss happened after coming back from one of my favorite places, a remote island in Maine with lousy internet service. Restarting the computer at home and agreeing to an update clearly caused a hitch. Yet drowning in the existential void felt literal for a few hours, something I’m embarrassed to admit now. Would losing this file really matter? A loaded question, but it leads to other questions about who I am or may never be.

There’s no point to writing if my stories simply vanish, like trees crashing with no one to read or hear them. Or is there a point? I’ve spent so much time dreaming the novel into being inside myself. That’s valiant or stupid, disciplined or distracting, creative or obsessive. It’s intrinsically valuable or worthless. Grieving a loss nobody else can conceive of doesn’t have to be shameful. Still, it felt as if a piece of me had died.

I’ll admit to something else, too: this novel is my theory of everything. I keep cramming in characters and tangled plot lines. Before the file went missing, I’d almost convinced myself I would finish it this year; it was now or never. It’s a big fat novel about the Bay Area I first drafted in the late 1990s, then laid aside, then resuscitated by changing the main character, then allowed to morph into a serial of three parts, which agents told me I could never sell in that form. But I knew this already.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I was working on the novel just for me. The plot convolutions kept my mind occupied, especially during the long years my parents were dying or as my son grew up and went to college during the pandemic. When I have trouble sleeping (which is always), I imagine my main character, what she would do or say, how she’d see the world. It’s the equivalent of counting sheep.

And I can easily imagine myself as Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch, toiling over his Key to All Mythologies. The rigid writer-scholar who never finishes his great work, failing to encompass everything in one place, is a mean-spirited figure in George Eliot’s opus. Yet there’s pathos, too. When I first read Middlemarch decades ago, I saw Casaubon as a cautionary tale. Young Dorothea Brooke, his wife, had my sympathy and still does, given the way he treats her. But there’s enough Casaubon in me to understand that not finishing is a defense against the passage of time.

Endless incompleteness feeds hope — and fends off the need to acknowledge failure. At the very least, it’s a strategy for lighting a few matches in the void. The trouble came when I discovered that such hope could be ripped away without my permission.

Here’s what followed: I recovered the file with my husband’s help, although even he, an engineer, was flummoxed by why it had been auto-deleted. Joy and hosanna, the relief of being pulled back from the edge. Yet before he arrived, I had already managed to calm down. That happened serendipitously, by listening to an episode of This American Life titled “Swim Towards the Shark.” As I looked for meditation exercises to control my panic, it popped up in my podcast queue.

It’s eerie, how much this episode spoke to the moment I found myself in. The various stories circle around the notion that when bad things happen, maybe we should swim towards danger rather than avoiding it. “In a crisis,” goes the tagline, “when all logic suggests that you get away from the dangerous thing, how will you respond?”

In the prologue, Ira Glass interviews two guys who helped another one being attacked by a shark off a San Diego beach. The two were already in the water when they heard “shark!” and distant cries for help. Their almost-instant response was to swim towards the bloody uncertainty of a predator on the loose rather than to protect themselves — and Glass wants to know why. The two guys, affable and self-deprecating, give their reasons, but there’s no single answer to why.

The next segment more directly takes on the question. In “If I Only Had My Brain,” Sarah Polley recounts her counterintuitive recovery from a concussion. Polley, a writer, director, and actor, struggled for years with the aftermath of a bizarre accident in which a fire extinguisher fell on her head. She tells Sean Cole, the producer interviewing her, that she got used to her limitations — oversensitivity to light and sound, migraines, brain fog — which cut into every aspect of her life:

“I remember just backing up and removing myself and going and sitting in a dark room and going, something’s happened. I feel like I can cut through the air with my hand like it’s butter, like it’s a substance. And I remember saying to my husband, David, did reality always feel like this?”

Polley consulted many concussion experts, but she credits neuropsychologist Michael Collins with shoving her out of an overly cautious approach to her body. Instead of retreating, he told her to “attack” the pain and the world’s bright loudness. (She recounts him scolding her in their initial visit, “If you have a nap in the day, I will yell at you.”) Despite extreme discomfort in the early days of his protocol, “by the end of six weeks, just like the doctor had said, she was totally cured” and has been for five years. Her 2022 memoir is even titled Run Towards the Danger. As Polley puts it:

“It honestly just felt like a veil lifting off the world, like I’d been behind this screen that I didn’t know I was behind. And my vision had adjusted to everything being a bit blurry. And then suddenly, everything was clear and in technicolor and beautiful.”

This is why, as I grappled with my novel vanishing, “Swim Towards the Shark” gave me an edifying shake to the soul. My gut-wrenching sense of loss was a stand-in for something else. Since the summer began, I’ve been dealing with a more physical crisis than a missing computer file, one not unlike Polley’s concussion: serious back and nerve issues, including a herniated disc. Losing my ability to move easily through the world, to do all the physical things I’m accustomed to, has been harder than I thought.

I’m not supposed to bend down or carry anything. The doctors have cautioned me about tripping and falling. I’m supposed to observe every “clinical change.” (I think of Polley tracking her symptoms in notebooks for years.) I’m not supposed to sit or write at my desk too long — and when I do (of course I do), I feel sore and guilty. I do my physical therapy exercises every morning but keep worrying about doing more harm. I’ve been avoiding an array of dangers, resenting every second of it.

So, I wonder if I should have lost the novel, my theory of everything. That blast of existential despair felt as if it would sink me, swallowing me whole like a shark. Except maybe it’s time to swim towards this internal danger: admitting I might never complete a great novel. My youthful dreams might be dead, but I’m not dead. Yet.

There’s something stubborn about certain memories, something lovable despite the grief they bring. Ever since getting an MRI that revealed the damage to my spine, I’ve been remembering how I used to do full back bends in my childhood bedroom. It’s so vivid: my single bed with its red-and-green striped Indian spread filling the room; the narrow trench of shag carpet where I did my exercise routines, listening to music on a record player. I’d watch my hands descend as I arced back into the void, going down, down, down — until I reached the safe floor. I’d bend like a willow to “Sunshine on My Shoulders” or “You’re So Vain.” I recall scribbling the lyrics from Judy Collins’s “Albatross” into a school notebook:

The lady comes to the gate dressed in lavender and leather
Looking North to the sea she finds the weather fine
She hears the steeple bells ringing through the orchard
All the way from town
She watches seagulls fly
Silver on the ocean stitching through the waves
The edges of the sky

Many people wander up the hills
From all around you
Making up your memories and thinking they have found you
They cover you with veils of wonder as if you were a bride
Young men holding violets are curious to know if you have cried
And tell you why
And ask you why
Any way you answer

I never want to lose the sound and feel of this memory — the pain of remembering or my soul taking flight. It’s also possible this memory is with me now because I can’t avoid the danger. In writing this essay, many memories are swirling, but there’s no logic beyond emotional connections: thinking of Middlemarch and Casaubon and Dorothea, my youthful body arcing into a graceful bow, the words and orchestral lilt of that Judy Collins song, which evokes a Victorian loss worthy of George Eliot, a woman watching the world and the edges of the sky and trying to remake herself.

If I keep swimming in the same direction, I admit to raw terror under all attempts to rationalize what I should do next. I never want to fail. I never want to die. But swimming towards failure is not the same as drowning; it’s like rescuing the man attacked by a shark. Maybe I need to hold failure in my hands like my green meditation stone until it warms, becomes familiar, is no longer so scary.

I’m left with questions, that great big why? If I swim towards my limits and beyond, how hard should I push? With physical therapy and yoga, there’s always the question of what kind of pain is good pain, an indication of effort rather than injury. When and how should I stop babying myself? What’s required to rewire the brain, physically and cognitively, in the way a psychologist like Dr. Collins would call for?

Part of acknowledging failure involves watching all my theories and routines fail. As they did when I left the Maine island in a storm on the mailboat ferry, fearful and seasick, unable to focus on the horizon with the window flaps down. Gray waves rolled the hull like giant god hands trying to snatch us under. Spears of pain hit my lower back, the bench rattling beneath me. I tried to hold my body rigid. I failed to be stoic, like the woman near me who said she was eighty, who’d been carefully handed down the wet mossy steps from the dock by a boat hand. With her white hair and open pink face, she seemed unperturbed by asking for help or the rocking boat.

The loss of my physical ease in the world slams me up against mortality. My back is slowly recovering, but I’m not sure I’ll ever recover completely, and the grief does sting: tears spurting when I can’t move a heavy futon out of the way or carry a laundry basket up and down stairs. Following the boat ride, after a long car trip home with a friend in dumping rain (my husband still back on the island), I dissolved into sobs. At home, I heard my son’s hesitant steps up the stairs to my bedroom, where he hugged me wordlessly, as I cried about a canvas bag that remained soaked through.

I feel foolish even recounting this, as if there’s something inherently weak in me. Yet as the days since my return have gone by, I’m reminded of my denial and numbness after deaths I thought I’d prepared for, when hair-rending pain would then break through no matter how much time had passed.

Not long before I left for Maine, as I was clearing out old files, I came across a 2014 memorial to my father that included comments from his professor colleagues about what a wonderful man he was — how much he cared about students, the way he built programs for those coming back to school as adults, his brilliance. It had me sobbing and sobbing, as if a faucet had just been turned on. I wanted him with me again, though he never could be. I had failed to say exactly the right thing, as we all do.

My novel isn’t gone, but I did lose something. Not hope or willful blindness to growing older, not any of that. I told my son I’m back to being a realistic pessimist, after a strange lapse into optimism — but I do wonder about the chattering demons and portents I’d ignored before my back gave out. Sometimes sudden losses fling you to another universe, all those wormholes opening when conventional doors slam shut.

If I hadn’t recovered the file, I doubt I could write this piece, or it would have taken me much longer to find myself in a new place. This time, I was saved, but what was I saved from? Perhaps a more radical change that could have infused my writing in different ways. I’ll never know for sure. That’s the damn thing about life.