The Sentient-Being Diet

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NASHVILLE — Two weeks ago I was reading a book by a brilliant writer whose life was cut short by melanoma — “Dying: A Memoir,” by Cory Taylor — when I noticed a weird little growth on the skin just above my heart. A weird little growth right where long ago I used to slather a baby-oil-and-iodine concoction as I sat on a dorm roof during my college years. A weird little growth that suddenly struck me as almost certainly malignant melanoma.

In the midst of a miraculous book, I tend to go overboard on empathy. I walk around inside a little bubble of mirth when I’m reading a really funny essay collection, and I carry a lingering sense of disquiet when I’m in the middle of an unsettling novel. If I read a memoir about dying, pretty soon I will believe I’m dying myself.

When that little growth — really, more of an overachieving mole — popped up on my skin, I made an appointment with a dermatologist. It seemed like a good idea to ask a person with an actual medical degree to decide whether the irregular mole just above my heart was anything to be concerned about.

A memoir about death by malignant melanoma is definitely not good waiting-room reading in a dermatologist’s office, so I studied the posters on the walls. There were ads for CoolSculpting, which can somehow eliminate a double chin in one hour without surgery; stem-cell injections that “Harness the Power of Platelet-Rich Plasma”; a “dermal filler” designed to “plump” inappropriately plumpless areas of the face; saline injections to reduce unsightly veins; a cream offering “free-radical protection”; and a plan for banishing underarm sweat that leaves patients “clean, confident, carefree forever.” There was also a small pamphlet on Botox, which seemed a little 20th century in the shiny new age of Platelet-Rich Plasma.

Looking at this panoply of options for correcting errors of appearance I had carelessly committed with my 56-year-old skin and my drugstore moisturizer, I did not think, “Gosh, I should really look into getting myself some free-radical protection.” What I thought was, “Wouldn’t it be a luxury to spend any amount of time worrying about underarm sweat?” What I thought was, “I wish I lived in a world where my greatest worry was underarm sweat.”

I spent last year in mourning for my country. I volunteered on behalf of people imperiled by the results of the 2016 election. I wrote checks to resistance efforts, hoping they would make a bigger difference than I could make by myself, and blog posts about nature, hoping they would focus my mind on eternal things. The devastations — to the poor, to the environment, to immigrants, to people of many faiths and races, to our nation’s very institutions — kept coming anyway. And all because a minority of my fellow citizens, through the auspices of an antique electoral system, had sent a lying, selfish, irrational, jingoistic, uneducable, race-baiting misogynist to the White House.

“You’re a sentient being, and this is a stressful time to be a sentient being,” my longtime primary-care doctor said at my annual checkup in November. Since there is very little he can do to reform American politics, this wonderful doctor has devised an eating plan designed to reduce the flood of stress hormones into the bloodstream. He gave me a handwritten instruction sheet, suggesting I try it for a month after the holiday fire hose of brownies and Brie had shut down for another year.

I wasn’t completely convinced. Not all that long ago, I publicly disavowed diets, and my doctor’s eating plan for sentient beings is so low in carbohydrates that it carries a strong whiff of dieting. Also, red wine does not appear on his list of permissible food items, so I made him no promises.

Instead, I’m pledging this year to fight despair any way I can. Not just my own despair, but the despair of people who largely put this president in office. A republic cannot survive in a state of cataclysmic despair. A democracy relies on optimism, but the very wealthy are the only people who have any reason to enter the new year in a state of optimism, and their giddiness won’t last through even the first quarter of 2018. (Very wealthy people tend to be uncommonly gloomy. Which only goes to show that money truly can’t buy love or happiness, though it can buy the United States Congress.)

In 2018, I’m resolved to do better at listening to people on every side. Empathy is always the best tool for fighting despair, and since trying to hear what’s behind all this anger and all this fear and all this defeatism is the surest route to empathy, I have unhidden the Bernie-or-busters I cut from my Facebook feed in 2016. And I’m listening to them alongside all the people I know who somehow believe the jury is still out on President Trump. I hope they’re listening to me, too. I hope we’re all listening to one another.

The new year arrives in a flash of fireworks and a clink of glasses and a smiling kiss for a beloved. It’s a time for believing anything is possible, for setting out-of-reach goals and trying to reach them anyway, and for today, at least, I’m feeling a tiny little tug of optimism. The old, sad year is gone now, the darkest winter night is past, and the new year is open and whole and waiting. And this is the way the world changes: by trusting it can change.