Prune Juice, Courage, and the person I want to Be

I got the stomach flu recently, and in the process of recovering have been suffering from some major constipation. This is how you know this will be a fun post. I decided to take something, but didn’t want to take a chemical, so I went for prune juice. We’d used it with our son when he was younger, and it seemed to work. I knew I wouldn’t need much, but the smallest, cheapest bottle was pretty big.

Prune juice tastes like it sounds. Even if you have never eaten a prune, I’m sure a raisin has crossed your palate, so if you can imagine what a raisin smoothie would taste like, you’re pretty close. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be that bad. I was already queasy, and had a lot of trouble swallowing it.

Then I remembered how smell and taste are connected. I worked in a wine bar and had hosted tastings. A wine glass collects aromas with a slightly curved lip, and a gentle sniff before partaking opens the palate. The same is true the other way. Close the nose, and you close the palate. It’s a like a flue.

“Hold your nose if you have to,” flashed through my head. An admonishment I’d heard through the years when I’d balked at something. Something inside of me flared, challenged. There are people who can just do things and there are people who need to be coddled to do things, and I want to be a person who just does things, because that’s what they expect me to be. Because they get mad when I need to be coddled.

I almost drank the next dose without holding my nose, but the memory of the taste rang pretty strong. Holding my nose didn’t kill the taste entirely, but it dimmed it down enough that it was palatable. I didn’t hate myself for drinking it like I did before. And it made it easier to take the third dose (ugh!) and then fourth (yuck!).

I realized that I had missed the message in the admonishment. The important part isn’t that some people have to hold their noses and some don’t; the important part is doing the thing. Do whatever you need to do, but drink the juice. The courage doesn’t come from not holding your nose, the courage is when you drink the juice.

Reflecting on how that admonishment had hit me, had almost kept me from holding my nose, I thought more about how when I was younger, when I was growing and developing, I thought this way a lot: “This is the kind of person I want to be.” A lot of these statements are good and valid and make sense: I want to be kind. I want to be nice. But at lot of them were performative, and looking back at it now, I can see the seeds of ableism being sowed, the foundations of an early mask.

Sure, we’d all like to be someone who can just drink the juice without holding their nose. But it’s not a moral failing, it’s not a flaw of character, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you if you can’t. You don’t have to hide the fact that you don’t want to drink the juice. Hold your nose if you have to, but do not feel ashamed for doing so. Drinking the juice shows your character just fine.