I write to you with the particular warmth of a man who has recently discovered that his lower back pain, which had progressed from inconvenient to genuinely debilitating, was, in fact, a delivery system for something else entirely. A Trojan horse of discomfort that carried within it an experience I hadn’t known to ask for, and would not have known how to articulate had it not already happened to me. Which is to say: I went in for physical therapy and came out wearing something that felt a lot like submission, and the strangest part was how much better my back felt afterward.