Why the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is spiritual gold

Don’t read this if you don’t want spoilers for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King. 

A girl gets lost on a trail while hiking. The age old story, girl meets woods, woods try to eat girl, except with the additional wrinkle that these woods contain a monster, the God of the Lost. It is an angry wasp demon, but also sort of a bear. 

Aside from being a great horror story, this book contains some of the best lessons I’ve gained so far during this stupid illness.

From 2004-2014 there were 46,609 search and rescue cases in national parks and wilderness across the US. Many people are kitted out, follow a map and get lost anyway. A path leads off sideways and months later squirrels are using finger bones to crack walnuts.

Trisha doesn’t do anything we wouldn’t do. She went to pee and her life exploded. Which is exactly the kind of shit chronic illness shovelled out to us. None of this makes sense, none of it is fair.

The God of the Lost preys on those who have become unsolvably lost. Trisha has drawn the monster in because she is off the map. The future has changed from “school” to “unknown.” 

And now we get Trisha, because we know what it means to watch the structure of our lives fall away like a house of cards, leaving a void that our brain fills with the worst outcome in order to comfort ourselves that we can survive it. Except we, like Trisha, can’t survive the worst outcome. For Trisha this would be “die here, become squirrel tools.” 

Even a continuation of her situation is a nightmare. 

“Live in woods, learn to eat bark.”

Similarly for us, the current status quo stinks and the fear of it worsening is unmanageable.

Many people have never been in a situation that couldn’t be solved by looking at the worst case

1. Sexy table dance at office party
2. Worst outcome: fired from job?
3. Yes, very bad but survivable 
4. Continue with life. Drink fluids

But this trick only works if the worst case is manageable.

If stage 3 is a blank void, the brain stutters to a halt. 

It runs step 2, trying to trigger 3. 

Step 3 is a void but also on fire now. 

The brain does step 2 again.

The brain generates eight colours and crashes.

After rebooting, the brain will turn into Nower Jebel, a character in Star Wars, whose job it is to repeatedly shout “the rebellion is finished.” This part of the brain sees uncertainty as an actual Death Star. It would rather pack up shop than deal with the unknown.

We have to find morale from somewhere new. Trisha relies on hallucinations and baseball rules to guide her. I get my spiritual guidance from Stephen King novels and Star Wars. It’s not stupid if it works, even temporarily. If we knew that a bunch of inane shit was the shaky bridge that took us from this flaming wasp-bear of a situation to a better place, we’d be all in.

What does it mean to be lost? 

In the woods without a map is a start.

Secondly, an uncertain future and our brain's incontinence in dealing with it.

A third aspect of being lost is despair.

It is only when Trisha stumbles onto a road that wasp-face comes in for the kill. 

Wouldn’t she have been more lost and therefore better prey in the woods than after having found a road?

To answer that, we need to understand setbacks.

A setback is the experience of moving backwards a bunch of steps on a journey.

In project management it’s called “fuck.”

In chronic illness it isn’t called anything because we’re not in the mood for naming things right now. A setback is one of the worst aspects of chronic illness because it puts the deadline on recovery back indefinitely. Secretly, we fear it indicates that there is no way out of the woods. 

The God of the Lost is an example of how setbacks are fucking with us in order to make us feel lost. 

At the end of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, just as Trisha sees the exit, the monster steps out, a symbol of inevitable death. 

We and Trisha are supposed to believe that every step leading to this point has been part of a game. She’s been dragged back to the start. If evil wasp bears could make self congratulatory speeches, this would be the time.

However, this scene is a sleight of hand. The safety seemingly in Trisha’s grasp is in her grasp. Without despair she isn’t lost, and if she isn’t lost the monster can’t eat her. What it is working hard to pass off as a grand finale is a desperate gambit. The God of the Lost does not have its wasps in a row. 

In real life a setback is a naturally occurring event, not an evil plan. 

However, a setback that looks like a return to the start is a trap, even if nobody set it. Our brain is wired to trip on that kind of event. This is a new place, with a new set of problems. 

One could argue that chronically ill people are already under attack. That bear has pounced. 

This is true. But setbacks are definitely bonus bears. 

Finally, we could say that it’s our party and we can despair if we want to.

Despair is bad medicine. Even if nobody is cackling behind a tree, lying down in the snow is a poor survival strategy. Whatever a good outcome entails, one ingredient is vital. We have to be there. 

So we understand what it means to be lost.

In order to avoid becoming so, this book teaches two things.

1. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal, however meagre and ridiculous to keep showing up for yourself. It’s not over just because you don’t know how it ends.
2. Don’t let assholes, whether those assholes are monsters, events or your own brain convince you that it’s time to throw in the towel. Most of the time, we are looking at things with 20/50 vision.

Trisha is suffering from pneumonia and a giant demon bear has crawled out of the woods. Sleight of hand or not, it’s not looking good. But that’s what brings me to the last insight this book has to offer.

The final message isn’t “have faith and monsters will be vanquished.” 

It isn’t “you are really close to winning.” Some of us aren’t.

The point is that even if it’s hopeless, you don’t have to let this bullshit tell you that you’re lost.

Not when it hurts, or when symptoms hunt you round your own home, or flatten you to the ground. Not when your illness pretends you are back at day one.

This could eat us. It’s eating us now. The monsters really might win. 

Not being lost is not about denying the odds. It’s not about hope. It’s about something much smaller and deeper than hope.

If there is one thing we can control, it’s that here, in the critical, deadly moment that is this illness, we get to plant our feet when everything is conspiring to unbalance us. 

Trisha finds herself in crisis. She sees this as the Bottom of the Ninth, a baseball term that translates as the last possible moment where one might choose to take an action. However hopeless, however useless the tools, this choice is within her power and she takes possession of it. She takes a stance, and makes her move.

Any larger consideration would lead to despair. But in focusing down onto the one thing she controls, her absolute reality in this place and this time, she creates the walls of a fortress around a space that is charted. This is a map of the known, here (where I am), now (which I alone experience). This land is inviolable, it is the last bastion of what is ours beyond wasp gods and chronic illness and all of their stupid evil poser speechifying bullshit. 

There is a space and instant within us that belongs only to us, if we can find it. 

This is a sentimental book. By the rules of the story, Trisha is rewarded for her refusal to become lost.

In the absence of any justice guiding the world we live in, we can’t be assured of a wage for our perseverance or a story that makes sense. We are lost in the woods and might remain so.

There is a version of this book I can imagine where a violent conclusion takes place after Trisha’s last stand.  

But this version still raises a fierce salute in my heart, and a middle finger to the God of the Lost. Life and its many monsters might hurt us without reason but those monsters will always go hungry while we remain found.