Am I Still Me If I Can’t Hold a Spoon?

A reflection on chronic pain, identity, and what remains when your body begins to fail

Jul 18, 2025

Are we our bodies? Or are our bodies just the mechanism that our mind experiences the world through? Classic philosophy question, and classic question for late night smoke sessions.

“Like… what if the color blue I see…” *hits blunt “isn’t the same color blue that you see?” *passes blunt
“Bruh…” *takes blunt “you just blew my mind bruh…”

I’m not treading virgin ground here. But the question has become much more practical for me of late. I’ve always been the “smart guy” in nearly any group I’m in. It’s a key part of my identity.

Body as Identity, Body as Betrayer

But from my early teens I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to prove that the weird nerdy kid could also be a physical specimen. I played pee-wee football in middle school. In high school I played three years of basketball, and while I wasn’t very skilled, I worked hard, and had a body that was just fun to exist in.

I could outrun most people. I could out jump them. I didn’t have my adult strength yet, but it was on its way. By my late 20’s I’d sculped myself into a person that could successfully run a half marathon and then hours later pass the initial Jeopardy! test. Brain or brawn? Why not both.

Of course I knew that my body was going to decline as I aged. But I fought against it. Now in my mid 40’s, I can still run a 5K in under 25 minutes and do 50 pushups. My joints ache a bit more, and I need to take more time warming up, but I can do it.

Or, I could.

Over the past 18 months I’ve dealt with a four-month long migraine and months of constant pain across my upper body. Not from an injury, but the decay of the discs in my neck. They are flattening and bulging, and now they are poking into nerves they shouldn’t be poking, and the bones are doing the same.

Am I my body? Or is my mind just using my body?

Which takes me back to the question, am I my body? Or is my mind just using my body? Is the self only intangible? Or are we locked into this amalgamation of flesh, and anything we think of as our intangible self is just the end result of our particular neurons and hormones?

Philosophy is still trying to figure it out.

For what it’s worth, science is pretty much on the “we are just meat” side. Or if you prefer Carl Sagan, stardust remixed.

And for me, I want to believe in the pure intangibility of “the self”.

But I feel like I already know that isn’t true.

As I type this with shaking hands that cannot be trusted to tap the right keys, my mother-in-law, let’s call her “K”, is watching TV next to me on the couch.

She was a flight attendant, commercial artist, and college professor for a time. But now, due to the material failing of her brain…

She can’t choose what clothes to wear
She still may put on her pants backward. Buttoned and all, and she couldn’t tell you how she did it.
She can’t draw a clock face. She doesn’t know what year it is. Or our address.

Is she still K?

The Fight Against the Waning Light

What does that have to do with me? After a neck surgery that only temporarily returned me back to full functionality I finally sat down and began the writing I’d always wanted to do. In six months I banged out a 137K word memoir and added a 63K novel, ya know, just for funsies. All this while training for the marathon I planned to run at the end of the year.

In the words of President Whitmore,

“We will not go quietly into the night!”

Or better, Dylan Thomas.

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

(I am trying to prove my intellectual bonafides on this Substack, better to go with the poet than the president from Independence Day)

Entropy is… Inevitable

But as I’ve switched to my next project (this one! The Substack you are reading! So meta!) , the cascading failure of my neck vertebrae roared back. Constant pain across my neck, shoulders, chest and arm. A fog of pain that my brain struggled to break through.

On less bad days, I manage to do my job and write. But the bad days outnumber the good. And with each day I have one less to get my words out in the world, one less day to find my audience.

The 3-Step Framework for coping with chronic pain:
1. Acknowledge the grief (denial fuels despair).
2. Adapt your goals (marathon → 5K).
3. Advocate for your needs (doctors aren’t mind-readers).
Key lesson: Resilience is reinvention. Pro tip: Track small wins—they’re proof you’re still *you*.

I am being treated and am confident that I’ll recover. But what if I don’t? What if my nerves deteriorate to the point that I can’t type? That all of these ideas I have about ethics, moral philosophy, and undead dragons (I contain multitudes) just remain bottled up, because the connection between my thoughts and world is cut off?

Lightning Flashes… My Frozen Treat Dies… The Bowl Falls Gently to the Floor…

Dramatic. I know. But it’s a fact that one day my body will fail to function. And wherever the intangible “me” goes, either out of commission, or into some afterlife, it takes with it all of what hasn’t yet been communicated to the world.

This Substack is generally about moral philosophy, so what’s the point here? A little bit of indulgence. I just dropped and broke a bowl of ice cream. I dropped it, because my hand just… stopped working. For a moment.

But that moment was terrifying.
As that bowl of unicorn sparkle ice cream fell to the floor I saw my sense of self falling with it.

Unicorn sparkle. It was my birthday this week. And my wife loves me.

I am going to crumble and fade away.

We all will.

I hope that all the people who will help that moment stay as far away as possible do so with empathy and care.
But I can’t guarantee they will. And I can’t do it all alone.

So, I owe everyone all the dignity and respect I can provide.

Dignity preserves the self.

And as I help others preserve their “selves”, I cannot expect others to do the same for me. But more often than not, people deliver more than I would have dared hope for.

Now excuse me. I need ask K to tell me about the time she met Paul McCartney while working on an international flight in the 1970s.

Controversial opinion: Pain isn’t 'just pain'—it’s a thief. It steals your past self and leaves a stranger. How has pain, physical or otherwise, changed how you see yourself? Share your story in the comments.