The time I tried acupuncture

The practitioner was a Romanian woman, about my age, with jet-black hair and a round, sweet face that carried a natural compassion. Before our meeting, she had asked me to send a photograph of myself with my tongue stuck out. I hadn’t found this off-putting; on the contrary, it intrigued me.

We began by talking. She wanted to know why I had come, what state I would describe myself to be in emotionally. She told me she could see stress and sadness in the photo. My tongue, she explained, showed signs of water retention. That seemed odd, since my wife is always urging me to drink more water, convinced I don’t drink enough. “It isn’t how much you drink,” the acupuncturist said, “but how much you hold.”

She placed me within the five-element system of Chinese cosmology: I was “metal,” a constitution where grief is central. Unsurprising, perhaps, given what I told her - my father’s death, the traumas of COVID restrictions, my step-brother’s behaviour. And yet it didn’t feel entirely true. What I had felt most strongly wasn’t grief, but anger. She suggested grief ran deeper, as part of my nature, shaping my struggles with alcohol, with obsession, with the way I sidestepped social life. Perhaps she was right.

I have never quite known what to make of these cosmologies. They strike me as being about as accurate and as arbitrary as astrology. Systems that claim to know you better than you know yourself; that assign you an element, a sign, a ruling planet, as though your entire personality can be charted by the hour of your birth. It is remarkable that so many people, even today, can pin their decisions and hopes on something so random. That everyone born in November should somehow be fated to be loyal and sexy, but fatally unforgiving if wronged. That my tongue, swollen or not, should consign me to “metal,” with grief as my governing principle.

Of course, the sky does shape us in the most basic ways. The moon tugs at the tides and at menstrual blood. The sun commands the rhythms of plants and animals, dictating warmth, growth, and light. The planet’s rotation gives us day and night, and without the circadian cycle, our minds would fracture. Those are facts. But to go further than that, to say that Neptune or Venus arrange our loves, or that we are born as wood or fire, feels like a leap.

And yet, these leaps endure. We reach for them because they offer story. Because they give our pain a vocabulary and our quirks a shape. To be told “you are metal, grief is your essence” may not be scientifically valid, but it can feel poetically true. Perhaps that is why we keep these cosmologies close: not because they explain us, but because they console us.

Then the treatment began. I lay down while she placed needles in my arms, arranging my hands so that they pointed towards each other but did not touch. Warmth spread through me, a calm so unexpected it startled me. Above, the light fractured into shifting rainbows on the ceiling as the sun moved through clouds. Watching them, I felt briefly that existence itself was miraculous. A swell of gratitude rose in me, for those I loved, for those who had loved me, even for the acupuncturist, shuffling papers nearby, a quiet reminder of her thoughtfulness and presence.

In my body the sensation deepened. My hands grew heavy and strange, wooden almost, like roots growing toward each other under the earth. When she added a triangle of points to my forehead, I felt curious flickers and movements beneath the skin, as though another self were stirring there.

Calmly, she removed the pins, and with a smile, tapped my toes in a way that seemed almost sisterly. I asked her about herself—how she had come to this profession. She said she had never planned on acupuncture; she had intended another path. But there was a healing strain in her family, she explained, something inherited. Eventually, it became clear that she carried the gift, and she gave in to it. The work felt natural, she said, like a fish returning to its stream.

As I gathered my things, she asked if I wanted a hug. And though I hesitated, the truth was that a hug was exactly what I needed. My shoulders softened under her arms; the tension that had braced me melted away.

Afterwards, my face looked lighter, less burdened. I floated through a long afternoon of work with a rare calm. By evening, a sharp tension gripped my neck and shoulder, but that night I slept deeply, peacefully, as if something had finally been released