#68: Jordan Castro
"I couldn’t walk or stand or even crawl... My brother started blasting 'Stand Up' by Ludacris."
#68: Jordan Castro
Jordan is the author of The Novelist (2023) and Muscle Man (out now). He works as deputy director of the Cluny Institute and serves on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Nicolette.
Health Gossip with Jordan Castro
Astrology unknown (“I’m straight”)
Maryland, USA
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
A certain harmonious feeling, perspective, and capacity.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
My daily life now is more or less constantly burning away all of those parts of me that resist consistency, and humility; the parts that care too much about being “cool”… and having fun…
In short, I have a job.
How do you start and end your days?
I wake up, let the dogs out, prepare Yerba mate or coffee while swinging my legs back and forth and wiggling and circling my arms and hanging from my pull-up bar and moving around, pray, sometimes meditate, drink the caffeine I made, drive or take the train to work. I’m in a group chat with some friends where we text each other what are basically examinations of conscience, related to where we’ve been selfish, resentful, dishonest, or fearful that day. The group chat is for accountability — but I’m very inconsistent with it… Some days, I do that before I pray and meditate, so I’m more conscious of things to look out for. Often, lately, I’ve just been keeping it simple, and doing the Jesus prayer dozens of times in a row, using my prayer rope.
I’ve always struggled with being “self-aware” and inactive… The problem with being “self-aware” isn’t just laziness — I used to think I wanted to “feel smart” as a way of avoiding action — and in some sense that was true — I kept doing this thing, for example, where I’d remember to pray, but then not pray, the memory of praying making me “feel like” I had already prayed. It was weird. Especially because a part of me knew that this wasn’t the case — I got none of the serenity, perspective, insight, or anything else that sometimes came with praying — but I would still remember to pray, not pray, and “feel like” I had prayed. So, I thought, what am I actually getting? I was getting an ego shot. For a lot of my life, my so-called “self-awareness” allowed me to think of myself as “the kind of person who does, or would do, [x, y and z]” without actually having to do it. I could get the ego/identity hit without actually doing anything… And this pattern applied to a lot of things...
Anyway—
My days end the same way they begin: Let the dogs out, pray… I drink Trace ‘Stress X’ Magnesium.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
My friend
told me that every man should know what it’s like to be 200 pounds at least once in his life. So this spring, I decided to bulk. My normal resting weight is something like 165, super lean. Initially, 200 pounds seemed like an impossible thing. I thought that maybe I could do it over time, like over the course of a year. But then I started eating a giant tub of Greek yogurt every day, drinking a gallon of raw milk a day, eating four meals… and snacks… and so on… And suddenly I was 185, then 195…