Slogging, wobbling, / wavering. Atilt / and out-of-sync
I’ve been absolutely walloped by whatever cold / flu / lurgy that is going around the city and have spent a majority of the past three days asleep.
What I have re-learned in that time is that even after years of dealing with variations on illness and injury my initial reaction to physical limitation is always irritation. I will try to power through, and then I will fail, and then I will be annoyed that I failed, and then eventually (very eventually) I will arrive at acceptance. And then I will repeat that process because the lesson doesn’t stick, even just hours later.
It’s all very rage, rage against the dying of the light etc.
As a kid (asthmatic, obliged to be spending lots of time in hospitals) I read everything I could get my hands on.
Which meant I encountered scarlet fever (Little Women, What Katy Did Next, Little House on the Prairie); unspecified spinal conditions (The Secret Garden, What Katy Did, What Katy Did Next, A Christmas Carol); cholera (The Secret Garden); malaria (A Little Princess); addiction (The Picture of Dorian Grey).
(A side note on cousin Helen in What Katy Did: I’d read a whole book about her, alone)
Much later I read Brain on Fire; When Breath Becomes Air; The Collected Schizophrenias; A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise; The Empathy Exams; and in a different vein, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Still on the list: Migraine, by Oliver Sacks.
I am not someone who views illness and injury as “opportunities for growth” or whatever. I am too impatient, too attached to being able, for that to be my takeaway. But reading those books was my first encounter with what James Baldwin put so perfectly:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
— James Baldwin to Jane Howard, as quoted in Life Magazine, May 24, 1963 (Vol. 54, No. 21)
Attribution:
Can you imagine waking up
every morning on a different planet,
each with its own gravity?
Slogging, wobbling,
wavering. Atilt
and out-of-sync
with all that moves
and doesn’t.
— from Earth, You Have Returned to Me by Elaine Equi