On Sickness
Our bodies are meaningful metaphors, but only if we retain enough mental capacity to actually, like, process the metaphor itself, or something.
1.
Hi. Hello. It’s still me.
I have been sick. Sickness, if I can call it that. If you’ll allow me to entertain what I will already tell you, off the bat, is a hypochondriac, histrionic, hyperbolic narrative about a minor inconvenience suffered by way of a kennel cough I contracted at a dance party, passed along to the baby, who recovered from her mild sniffles in about a day, and who passed it back to me, where it festered.
So there I was, sick.
Sick!
Sick, and sleeping on the couch, and also sometimes not sleeping on the couch, but letting my mind wander as though playing the role of George Washington Crosby in Paul Harding’s Tinkers, or perhaps Tolsoy’s Ivan Ilyich, lying impatiently for the morticians to fix the death mask upon a visage occluded by just slightly protruding lymph nodes, facial hair gleaming with the extra glistening texture of Vick’s VapoRub™ under the nostrils.
And the whole time all I could think was: Virginia Woolf could have done so much with this. Or Susan Sontag, of course. Or Hilary Mantel, who recognized that “Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet:”
I am conscious that my brain is working oddly. Imagine you were creating all your experience by writing it into being, but were forced to write with the wrong hand; you would make up for the slow awkwardness by condensing phrases, like a poet. In the same way, my life compresses into metaphor. When I sit up and see the wound in my abdomen, I am pleased to see that it has a spiral binding, like a manuscript. On the whole I would rather be an item of stationery than be me. It is as if my thoughts are happening not inside my head but outside me in the room. A film with a soundtrack is running to my right. It keeps me busy with queries based on false premises. ‘Is it safe if I drink this orange juice?’ But I blink and the orange juice isn’t there. Therefore I study reality carefully, the bits of it within reach. For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my wrist. We call those ‘lines’, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of the blood drain, the epidural’s sweet sonnet form.
What glory; what rapture!
And where, then, I asked myself: where were all of my hallucinations and tidy metaphors? I asked the cats, one of whom slept through the entirety of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire on my chest, and the other who strayed every so often to verify that her wards against the pigeons and the flying squirrels were still holding, and neither had a satisfactory answer as well.
2.
Is sickness a narrative space for women authors to pursue? I recognize the question as patently false even as I pose it; I had pulled Mantel, as well as Leslie Jamison and Emily St John Mandel and Eula Biss off the shelves in an initial scan for quotes on sickness, in the forms of endometriosis and empathy and global plague and the relative merits of vaccination, to wrest from their works and misuse in my own context. And in doing so, I reached across Harding and Tolstoy, sure, as well as tuberculosis in Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine, and a Coca Cola-borne apocalyptic pandemic in Kevin Brockmeier’s Brief History of the Dead, to say nothing of Foucault’s plague ships and Marquez’s cholera and Saramago’s blindness and Puig’s psychological interpretation of homosexuality.
Or, as a cursory Google search has granted me, John Green’s Fault in Our Stars and a whole brood of YA novels that were, about ten years ago, decried as distasteful and disturbing. (That same Google search spawns a whole host of LitHub listicles of people peddling their own #SickLit novel by sharing their top four or five or ten favorite novels in the genre, YA or otherwise.)
But I have to tell you. I asked an AI search engine the leading question in the preceding paragraph. This is a different type of sickness I am admitting to, here, my fascination with the frequently troubled, frequently inane, (and highly likely to be frequently plagiarized) responses that emerge from these glorified word calculators.
And AI told me, “Yes, women write a lot of narratives about sickness, because of their greater capacity for empathy.” It told me that, yes, in its preponderance of wisdom and the billions of real-time neural linkages it could make across the corpus of all accumulated, written human knowledge it had reviewed.
Greater than whose capacity, I wondered: than that of the male of the species? Surely that comparative was not self-referential to mechanical flesh. But let’s not belabor the point, here, the overeager desire of a machine to respond to any prompt with facile recombinations of thoughts, since that’s all it’s doing, after all, probabilistically calculating the next best word to satisfy my query without any regard to a larger context.
And yet. (If I may be so bold, in an essay dangerously close to essentializing gender roles, to steal Roxane Gay’s most beloved sentence fragment.)
In On Immunity, Eula Biss argues that “we resist vaccination in part because we want to rule ourselves.” And I would argue that there is a critical axis of power — particularly in regard to the history of medicine, which has played out so often upon the victimized bodies under the clipboard and scalpel and speculum of white men — in which gender, as well as race and class and other interstitial identities all play a role. Even as simply as looking at a historical proceeding with a fresh set of eyes and saying: that’s fucked up. Why has no one ever said that’s fucked up? Why shouldn’t we be able to rule ourselves? This is Biss again: “Paternalism has fallen out of favor in medicine, just as the approach to fathering that depends on absolute authority no longer dominates parenting. But how we should care for other people remains a question.”
Whose writing are we consuming, my dear AI, I wish I could say to it. Whose narratives about pain and suffering. And to what extent that pain and suffering is real. Is divine, even. Not that it matters what AI babbles, of course, right? Except — and this has always been my concern, long before I knew the term large language model, and perhaps before I understood the Internet, though surely no sooner than I realized that I could neither command nor control what titles other people decided to check out of the library, nor what lesson they extract from them — except for what happens when someone takes a demonstrably false answer to heart as fact.
A 2022 study in Nature examined pro- and anti-mask sentiment along gender — and especially macho or toxic masculine — lines. The neighborhood bookstore that proudly serves women and children first still heavily encourages masks on weekdays, and mandates them on the weekend; so, too, many of the other independent stores along Clark Street that predominantly serve women and non-binary people emphasize the care and compassion they provide for people with autoimmune conditions. But the kink store almost directly below me does not; the gay bars do not. I think of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave.” These places may not have enduring COVID legacies but they have rallied, instead, around community support for mpox. Gay bars have always, at least since the AIDS pandemic, provided support and lifelines for community health initiatives, condom bowls and other safe sex practices, STI screenings.
I am not sure there’s a logical conclusion to this line of argumentation. Let’s blink, instead. If we blink, we’ll find the orange juice isn’t even there.
3.
There was decidedly no orange juice while I suffered on the couch because, either from cough drops or the sickness itself, the roof of my mouth started to kill. Much like Bersani, one could say, I came to realize how important it is to consider what one puts into one’s body - and just how important the sense organ that is the mouth is for functioning. Toward the end of it I went for a walk outside, just to be able to tell myself I felt the sun, and remembered the Buddhist anecdote Pema Chodron relays in a couple of her books. A haughty woman comes to the village priest and demands that he tell her the secret of nirvana, now. So he transformed into a demon and chased her with a stick shouting “Now! Now! Now.”
I think if one is successful at interpreting Buddhist philosophy, which I am not, the parable is supposed to mean something about enlightenment only being possible in our given circumstances. I have been too wrapped up in the present circumstances of much the same again and again, and the devil has been my mouth, all barbed tongue and silvered, glistening, purple pride. I have never said in one or two words what I could instead accomplish in eight. The last time I ate—
Well, I will tell you, instead, that as I have fought to make peace with my levantine demons for forty days and nights, I remembered the flippancy with which one of my best friends, the wisest poet I know, told me that she felt terrible that her husband wasn’t receiving blowjobs for the last two weeks, while she had been taking antibiotics following a root canal.
And I invite you to read her response and mine, though just one woman’s, and just one man’s, against the essentialism of our genders: one, who successfully manages her shit, all while still thinking of others; and the other, who loses his goddamn mind over a thirty-six hour window in which he has to call off from work and eat lukewarm macaroni and cheese from a box.