Check-ups, Follow-ups, and 'Sorry, Baby'
There’s that old adage about how our cells completely replace themselves every seven years.
Three years ago, I got a surgery that I seldom think about. It was unfathomable in 2022 to imagine I'd think about this surgery as little as I do now, but nowadays it's unfathomable that I thought about it then as much as I did. But I'm going to think about it a little bit now, if you'll indulge me (and don't mind me talking about my uterus at some length).
In 2022, after roughly 15 years of having periods that were unbearable pretty much from the jump, I had laparoscopic surgery that would diagnose endometriosis. That's the simplest description of what was going on in my oven, which per a combination of scans, examination by the surgeon, and some gnarly photographs taken during surgery, was a little more complex, if unremarkable from a health perspective. Nothing cancerous, nothing astronomically abnormal, and even the endometrial growth (cells? blobs?) found during the procedure was minimal. I have endometriosis and had a whole lot of junk that needed to be removed. Despite the surgery, an IUD, and a birth control pill on top of the IUD, I still have some pain and symptoms, but nothing otherwise seems to be wrong and I live life with far less distress and interruption than I did pre-2022. Even my surgical scars have all but faded away.
But in the months leading up to the surgery, I thought about it a lot; so much so, that I wrote a much longer detailing of these events just days before I was set to go under. For the few people who have been following me long enough, you might recall this mighty, literary essay covering everything on my mind as the reproductive problems that long plagued me were about to be treated. Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned, children were just slaughtered as cops looked on in Uvalde, Texas, and I tried to reckon with the idea of thinking about my relationship to my body, everything that had happened to it, and everything that could happen to it, as the future seemed oblique.
I've republished and am re-sharing this essay partially because, well, I've been terrible at writing for my newsletter. In fact, the last month I've been working rigorously at a forthcoming reported piece that I'm extremely proud of and looking forward to sharing in due time, and as I've been thinking about where I am now with my writing, it's remarkable to think that just three years ago, I was an amateur writer putting together words on Prometheus and my uterus for an infrequent newsletter delivered to a small audience.
Daniella Mazzio
There’s that old adage (or maybe it’s a younger one) about how our cells completely replace themselves every seven years. The person you are now is not the same person you were a dog’s year ago on the most granular of levels. I may have not been thinking about my surgery lately, but have been thinking about my cells. Last June marked seven years since I was coerced and sexually assaulted by a former boss and friend (also referenced in my Prometheus essay). And throughout 2024, I couldn't help but mark time by all the subsequent milestones I was ostensibly shedding from my system. There was the summer fling that temporarily patched up the feelings following the assault and an infatuation I found difficult to reconcile. There was the trip to Poland to visit a best friend, my first and only time out of the country, marked with excitement and new experiences but also quite a great deal of longing, loss, depression. I had graduated from theatre school June 2017, tried to quit my miserable college job as a deli clerk, now overshadowed by the re-contextualization of a work relationship, only to have a mental breakdown working an even more miserable job as a line cook for an emotionally abusive small-business owner in the West Loop. I lived for one year in a Logan Square apartment, too depressed to ever fully unpack, lying in bed in a room I think of every time the Chicago humidity is too tough to bear, with difficult roommates that gave me even more of an excuse to isolate. I paid for McDonald's meals with quarters and one time walked home from Jefferson Park (where I returned to working as a deli clerk) to Logan Square via Milwaukee Avenue because I couldn't afford CTA fare home. The variety show I was co-producing moved to a house-show DIY format after a major blow-up between producers — an event that led to some of the best shows I was a part of, but that also resulted in significant lost friendships. I went blonde for the first and only time in my life and could pull it off 50% of the time. I unsuccessfully rebooted a sketch show that was some of my proudest work in college, bombing commercially and artistically. Crucially, that October, I was admitted to the psychiatric ward for a week. I started Zoloft and made friends with one of the most beautiful souls I've had the pleasure of knowing. Next month will be seven years since she died.
As I describe this, I almost believe that it's true about our cells, because none of that sounds like the Daniella I know now. I know that girl from 2017, yes, but like a sister, an old friend. It's just as conceivable to me that she's another person I knew who couldn't survive, and every instance where I recall that year, recall the Daniella of that time, I see her in a loop I wish I could return to and save her from. When I think back to the girl who existed then — I think of one glued to a ledge. What has happened since objectively could be called healing, but if it is, I take those scars for granted just as much as the ones on my abdomen. It's something that once took up so much of my time, longing, and understanding of life, but now? It might as well have happened to someone else.
This is a movie newsletter, though, and I am a movie writer (though I wasn't 7 years ago), and here is where I reveal this is my way leading you into a movie review. These things — the surgery, the sexual assault, the mental breakdown, all the people I've loved and lost and loved, the way I used to only speak a vocabulary of sentimentalism — were seldom on my mind until I saw Eva Victor's feature debut Sorry, Baby, opening this weekend in select theaters.
As many critics will be paid and unpaid to tell you, it's probably best to not give away too many of Sorry, Baby's secrets. It's not so much that it's a film full of spoil-able plot points — you can likely intuit the central event, as I did, from the logline — but there's only so much I can convey in writing about a movie so strongly about walking through an experience alongside the person experiencing it. "Powerful" and "resilient" are easy enough words to toss around here, but "existence" and "time" were the more striking ideas in my experience. Power and resilience are things we opt-in for, and it can be cathartic to witness another person make that choice, but existence and time are the most mundane, non-consensual universal experiences we share. We have no choice in the matter of moving on, and Sorry, Baby is quite aware that even as it moves through time, moving on and forward isn't necessarily linear. Time moves forward, straight as an arrow, but our hearts are wobbly. Our cells move on, shedding in their routine cycles, but there's an emotional DNA that ebbs and flows. I was reminded of this when my breath started to quicken and my eyes started to well at a key point in the film. It took me hours to recover. I plan to watch the movie again.
Sorry, Baby may not be relatable to all, and it will be easy to dissect its work as an object; dialogue, humor; shot composition; performances. I overheard conversations after my screening about why it didn't work for some. I could try to articulate why it worked for me. But there's really not much more to it than Victor's honest understanding of how something feels when it's in your bones and is unlikely to leave, no matter how much time and life you try to put between yourself and that moment. However they got there, whatever artistic choices they made, I gave myself over to the experience, and I hope you do, too.
I want to believe I've put space between myself and 2017. Maybe I've put space between myself and 2022 (as I reread my writing, I hope there's been at least some forward momentum). But the old Daniella walks alongside me everyday, even when I don't see her. The way I've loved and hurt is much more than memories. They may seem strange to my head, my current understanding of the world — at turns far more optimistic, at others far more cynical — but they're in the flora of my gut, the expansion of my diaphragm, and the occasional tremble of my fingers. The endometriosis has been removed, but it can always come back. Societal scourge doesn't disappear with a change of an administration. I've loved the same person for almost seven years now, but it doesn't mean the other types of love that have filled my heart have gone away. Even the dead cells have to go somewhere; the cracks in the floor, the belly of the vacuum cleaner, or back into our lungs. When we choose resilience, it is not only about moving forward, but accepting that what is, what was, what could be, is always within us. ✿
I promise I have more newsletter works coming! Stay tuned and stay cool in these balmy summer days.