by EMILY ROBB
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag
Today marks three months since I grudgingly took up residency in that unsympathetic other place Sontag refers to. In my life I’ve visited for varying lengths; day trips, week-long stays, foggy months spent suspended somewhere on the borderline, grappling onto wellness with my feet weighted firmly in some colder shadow, but this time it’s been unambiguous. Ninety-three days (and counting) of physical and mental struggle. This is by no means a loss of perspective: I understand fully that this could be far worse, but for me, in the sweep of my experience, this is a rock bottom - a cold, hard, concrete blanket to hunker down with - and I want to talk about what that feels like.
These are grey days. They pass, one by one, each blurring achingly into the last, like a funeral procession. I lie in bed, sit on the sofa, sometimes manage a walk under the baby blossom on the village green - my life at the moment is not composed of many notes. Sometimes I burn with a disgruntled sense of the injustice; craving every small thing I can’t have with an impatience that makes me ready to tear my hair out. I want a glass of wine. I want a good night’s sleep. I want to have three happy thoughts in my head, not thirty frightening ones. I want to sit on the grass and enjoy spring, not just watch the daffodils from my window. I want to spend time with my boyfriend that we remember, not just side by side watching TV until I manage to fall asleep. I want to be well.
Illness seems most fiercely to me like a betrayal. I feel, in the heat of panic or the nauseating sweat of dizziness, let down by my body and unhoused by it. It’s a strange, alienating thing to feel this split so distinctly: to understand yourself to be both the person you know and the vessel that holds her. The person I consider myself to be is independent, initiative-taking, assertive. The person my body has temporarily rendered me is weak, needy and trapped. Of course, rationally I see that I am the betrayer rather than the betrayed - the one who was rude and thoughtless to her host, ignored the house rules and let the paint fleck and the damp spread. So, inescapably, a slow renovation is in order; in weeks to come things will be easier, but for now I must be patient and determined while we start from the foundations, building me up again so that I am, once more, weather-proof.
In the meantime, I wallow in a dank stagnation. There are days, of course, where I can muster more optimism; usually when physical symptoms linger almost unnoticed. In those days some liberty is granted from the pervasive unpleasantness which accompanies the physical sensations of being unwell, and - as a result - from the emotional misery illness brings. I have enough energy to work, walk, join in fully with conversation and think excitedly about days to come. These are the good days. Those, on the other hand, spent in pain, discomfort, or a perpetual state of nausea invite - unsurprisingly - very little positivity. Instead, they thicken my brain and heavy my eyelids like a pesticide stopping new life from growing - I can’t read or write, I struggle to appreciate the good and hopeful, I seethe with a horrible bitterness towards anyone enjoying the things I cannot, even watching TV is reduced to a time-passing exercise deployed to propel me dumbly from morning to night so that I can sleep again, in hopes tomorrow will be easier.
In my personal experiences of mental and physical illness, I have found them to breed, almost uncontrollably, an aggressive selfishness. In contending with your own feelings, sensations or pains daily, the world becomes narrowed: so amplified and accented are my own experiences, I struggle to see beyond them. This self-absorption brings out the worst in me; I fail to see or respond to other people’s struggles or achievements, smarting under the apparent injustice of tiny offences they cause me whilst brazenly ignoring (and contributing nothing to) their own need for happiness and fulfilment. In the blur and palpitation of panic, I dehumanise those close to me; angrily rendering them the pinata of my anxiety - bashing, bashing, bashing until we’re both defeated and a cloud of gnawing guilt and self-hatred swallows me up. Conversations run repeatedly to the monotonous tune of my illness; I drone on, aware that I’m boring them, but unable to step out of the parameters my body has currently imposed upon my existence and needing, desperately, to share.
But there are moments in illness to be savoured, too - tenderer ones. Hugs that take me away from it all. A walk where a daffodil peeping through the snow makes me think of new beginnings and hope (I’m still an English student, after all)... Comforting, home-cooked dinners. Parents who send me songs to play on the guitar and watch trashy TV with me as distractions. A boyfriend who hasn’t complained once about his life being put on hold, but instead writes me songs, holds or talks me through panic attacks, and travels across the country to visit me, even if I spend the weekend moaning, miserable or asleep. Plates of Sunday lunch brought home from my grandparents’ when I’m too unwell to go. Spending more time with my brother. My silly fluffy dog and his big Diana eyes.
Illness like this can be a wake-up call; a screeching of the brakes on a car that was hurtling out of control fast, bundling towards some larger crisis. Over the last year I have let my health problems snowball - brushing them aside day by day until my body cried mutiny and I stood back, horrified by how insurmountable the situation had become. In terms of my physical health, I don’t know when I’ll be better. I’m hopeful that it’ll be soon and am undergoing tests which will most likely push me in the right direction. With regards to my mental health, the work starts here. In seven years of suffering from anxiety, I’ve never fully committed to getting the help I need - the help I advise those close to me to seek in similar situations. Instead, I’ve stumbled through sixth form and most of a Cambridge English degree, skipping seminars, supervisions, lectures; spending hours in escalating frenzies of googling and hysteria; pretending to myself again and again that if I run or hide from my problems, they stand defeated. This lying is no longer good enough and there is a fire of determination kindling inside me, ready for change.
Siri Hustvedt writes in The Shaking Woman, “Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.” The last year of my life has felt like an unravelling to me; a gradual loss of control so potent that I’ve felt reduced to a helpless, bawling child. In writing this, however, I have sought to reclaim some sense of that control and of myself - a self-authorship which at present I am being denied - and, for the time being, it has served its purpose.
Today marks three months since I moved into Sontag’s “other place”, but it’s not all darkness here - today I wrote this.
