Tao Lin is the author of ten books, including Leave Society (2021) and Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018). You can find more of his recent writing on The Paris Review, Granta, and his Substack, Tao Lin.
#93: Tao Lin
Hawaii
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Daily poop. Experiencing nature. Feeling peaceful. Reading books that reduce fear, like The Truth About Contagion and Life After Life. Caring for and loving something — hard with humans, can use pets.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Working on my writing while caring for my cats and detoxing my liver and learning.
How do you start and end your days?
Start: exercise and meditation. End: talking to myself, my spirit guides, and my soul about my day and my upcoming dreams.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
I had chronic nosebleeds as a child. A doctor scalded the inside of my nostril to try to stop them. It didn’t work. From then on, I engaged with mainstream medicine many more times due to lung collapses, chronic pain, and other acute and chronic issues. Each time, my trust in it decreased. By my mid-thirties or so, I’d lost all interest in conventional medicine. I haven’t been to a dentist or a doctor since 2015 or so. I believe the body’s best healer is itself. I’ve been working on a book titled Self Heal since 2022. I put it on hold in 2024 because I had insomnia, chronic pain, and eczema. I’ve had these since my twenties but they were getting worse in 2024 and I was confused.
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