Hard to swallow

A literal post on disautomaticity

Disautomate (v.i.): Of a habitual physical action — to become awkward and unnatural as a result of overthinking, to an extent that you can’t figure out how you ever did it. Example: His use of the fork and knife disautomated to the point that he cut his finger trying to eat a steak.

In childhood I experienced, more than once, disautomation with putting on a T-shirt. Head in first? Arms? Right or left? Both? Eventually none of it felt right and I spent months getting the hang of it again. After those months, back in a comfortable state of automaticity, I would be careful to avoid thinking about how I now put on T-shirts, because (a) I was concerned about being disautomated again, and (b) I could never quite decide if my new automaticity was the same as my old, which raised specters of (a).

Then a few months ago my pill-swallowing disautomated. The context is this: I have a few supplements I’ve resolved to take regularly. The doses result in needing to swallow six pills¹, four of which are not small — not horse pills, but sizeable enough to cause hesitation.

When swallowing, you can’t hesitate.

I used to be incredibly good at swallowing pills. I had a technique. I could dry-swallow just about any single pill. Water was needed only for the most ghastly-tasting chalky specimens. And for multiple pills, I’d take them all at once. Single gulp. No problem.

But my pill-swallowing spontaneously disautomated. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember what my technique was. I never actually choked, but I started requiring pints of water. I’d feel the lump stuck somewhere between mouth and stomach. I started dreading the act, which made it easy to put off and meant that some days I wouldn’t get around to my pills.

I tried to recover my lost abilities. I remembered that I used to visualize the pills as a big juicy piece of steak, sufficiently chewed. Then when I would swallow it would all go down. But the visualization seemed to have lost its magic.

Then for no clear reason the other day I rediscovered automaticity. All I needed to do, it turned out, was not tilt my head back, but rather swallow the pills in a chin-somewhat-down position. From that position, I just needed to go back to visualizing the piece of steak and all was well. Voila! Nothing sticking in my craw anymore.

I suspect I was influenced by popular myth. I feel like somewhere there’s some idealized image of a person tilting back their head to swallow, and that’s the image I had in the back of my mind. Coke commercial, maybe? So I kept trying to tilt back and swallow, and the more I’d tilt back, the worse it got.

Anyway, a happy ending² and a chance to ask if anyone else has had a disautomation experience.

1. Please don’t ask which supplements or how much. It’s one thing to talk about religion and politics, but in my experience what really puts a rock in someone’s shoe is how much vitamin X you’re taking, or whether you’re taking it at all, in what form, how much, at what time of day. Over such questions have friendships been broken, blows been come to.

2. Your mileage may vary. For the lawsuit-happy, please note that I have no degree in deglutition.