Jed Wolf

The world first started spinning while I was pruning tomato plants. One moment I was reaching for a yellowed leaf; the next, I was face-down in the bush beans. The fall earned me a prescription for prednisone and a referral to physical therapy, where I arrived the day after the election looking like a deposed dictator in my dark glasses and eye patch.

The timing wasn’t lost on me. As the nation grappled with its own sense of vertigo, I could barely walk a straight line. The prednisone steadied me enough to dig in my garden while the country was coming apart, but it only masked the symptoms. My doctor wanted answers, not band-aids, which is how I found myself failing balance tests in a fluorescent-lit clinic while trying not to think about election results.

“When you turn your head, your blind eye is slow to move,” my physical therapist explained, mercifully sticking to business instead of politics. After a series of tests, she diagnosed me with vestibular hypofunction – a chronic brain malfunction that makes the world spin when I move my head. “It would be easier if you didn’t have an eye there at all,” she added. “Your brain is overloaded.”

I didn’t tell her about my other form of overload: years of mainlining cable news while working in my garden, political podcasts playing through sleepless nights. Like my body’s struggle to find equilibrium, my mind had lost its ability to filter signals from noise. Every headline set my ears pricking up like they did in childhood, when the sound of “ready or not” during hide-and-seek terrified me as much as the Cuban Missile Crisis or my mother’s car in the driveway.

The prescribed therapy was deceptively simple: focus on one spot and turn my head quickly from side to side for twelve minutes daily. So far, I can manage twelve seconds before the world begins to tilt. It feels like the rapid movement might shake loose a tumor, but that’s the point – to reprogram overloaded synapses until they stop reacting to everything. In other words: watch this spot until you stop trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world.

My husband Dave, who saved my life once by rushing me to the ER for what I thought was a heart attack, watches my exercises with concern. We’re both aging – his first hip replacement is scheduled for January – but we’ve learned to find humor in our deterioration. While I plan to build him a platform for getting in and out of bed, he jokes about my new role as his nurse. The smell of sawdust filling our garage, reminiscent of cedar shavings for a neglected hampster reminds me how little I know about nurturing.

Our neighbor Jar Brady, who’s building an elegant cedar fence next door, represents everything I’ve lost physically and a relaxation I’ve never had. Nearly my age but still lithe, he can rise from sitting cross-legged without using his hands. The morning after the election, while my last dose of prednisone was wearing off, I watched him working on his fence.

“Who won?” he asked when I wandered over.

“Check your iPhone,” I replied, not wanting to be the bearer of news.

“It’s a flip phone,” he said around a mouthful of deck screws. “For business.” Then he returned to his fence, embodying a kind of balance I’ve grown out of. 

I’ve stopped fishing since moving to Florida, after one look into a hooked fish’s eye made me question everything. Similarly, I’ve stopped consuming news since the election. Between Facebook’s algorithmic hooks baited with outrage and friends threatening to set me ablaze with their certainties, I’m learning to navigate by different stars, I think, hoping a little desparately for my vertigo to subside.

The physical therapy exercises are teaching me more than balance. Each twelve-second session reminds me that stability comes from focusing on what’s directly before me, not from trying to track every moving thing. Like the vestibular system in my inner ear, my attention needs recalibration. The world will keep spinning – politically, personally, perpetually – but perhaps I don’t need to spin with it.

Down here in paradise, where tourists and locals with opposing views somehow coexist, I’m discovering a different kind of equilibrium. I expect my vertigo will improve, as I become less interested in getting to the bottom of everything except my own recovery. The garbage and ash of constant news cycles settle into perspective, and surprisingly, the silence sounds like it might be hiding the lyrics to a song.