Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2020 13:30:36 GMT
Sick
For our Becoming Human series, poet and editor Cate Chapman writes about the parallels between navigating long-term illness and a planet and a people in a state of chronic crisis.
dark-mountain.net/sick/
or Kate, Caroline, Debs, Toots and Sammy – may all happiness be yours
Being sick absolutely sucks. When you’re sick for a long time, it still sucks. As with grief, you learn over time how to swim through the altered medium of your life with a little more grace than at the floundering start – the cold-shock horror of your head first going under does pass – but it still more or less sucks. You either learn to live within the limitations of a world you previously didn’t know existed, or you struggle in an immensely painful state of denial and frustration. Or maybe, like me, you do a bit of both. Either way, you have fallen, in a very visceral way, from a state of innocence into a state of knowledge, and the knowing is deeply painful.
*
There are so many parallels between the microcosm of chronic illness and the macrocosm of the converging crises of our time. I’m not such an egotist to imagine that they’re of anything like equal consequence (although of course when you’re in a body that feels like it’s falling apart around you, it does feel pretty central) but the one does seem to be a small, dim echo of the other. When I got sick there were a whole bunch of warning signs. I had a strong family history of the same chronic illness I ended up having. On top of this, the people who love me were telling me for months or years that the way that I was living was dangerously unsustainable. For whatever reason, I was unable to hear them. I was a compulsive over-worker, deeply committed to the co-operative I was co-running and totally fixated on the work. Towards the end, my body and brain were cracking under the strain, but I still ploughed on.It’s only too easy to draw the parallels.
The interesting question is why. In setting up the conditions for my particular plummet into ill-health, the reasons I behaved so compulsively are probably wrapped up (rather like everyone else’s compulsive behaviour) in my childhood experiences, as well as in my first (abusive) relationship. The provenance is probably also rooted in a kind of unacknowledged internalised capitalism, an obsession with productivity as the only real measure of value – the killer was that my productivity obsession was focused on creating social and ecological good. I thought I’d escaped the monster, only to find out too late I’d already been swallowed whole. Anyway, for a complex bundle of reasons I was trying to exert my right to exist in the world. Perhaps we all do this in some way. My single-pointedness, my compulsiveness, turned inwards and, combined with unfortunate genetics and sheer bad luck, resulted in my getting sick. Some other people’s single-pointedness and compulsiveness have turned outwards to create or augment the structures that are ravaging our world. We are all at least to some degree a product of our culture, and our culture is sick.
I think in some ways our great catalogue of human horrors and injustices are just manifestations of this one big brokenness. My sickness and the great sickness of our culture are not two separate, unrelated things.The recent outpourings of rage and increasing awareness around big single social justice issues, such as the ‘Me Too’ movement, BLM and the ongoing refugee crisis, are all manifestations of the endemic violence in our culture – of course these specific issues are desperately important and need addressing, but in a way each one represents only the tip of the corporate-capitalist iceberg: this paradigm that through deifying competition and individual gratification encourages domination, control and exploitation in many forms – not just of women by men or black people by white people, but of the global south by industrialised nations, of animals by humans and of the rest of the biosphere through human-created pollution, habitat destruction and climate collapse.
Similarly, in a very real way the chaos, alcoholism and sporadic outbreaks of domestic violence I and my siblings lived with as children, my horribly predictable teenage stumble into a long and abusive relationship with a much older man, my own feelings of lacking value or agency as a young woman – together with infinitely repeated similar experiences of other people – are one small symptom of the same great sickness that is now threatening all life. We are not somehow separate from these problems, either from their provenance or their effects. It’s like that adage about traffic jams: You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. It’s easy to cast ourselves as either victims or perpetrators, as if it’s a binary split.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s more complex than that. Those of us living in the industrialised West are ourselves an expression of the culture that is destroying everything – not just our getting into cars and driving to supermarkets to buy some plastic-wrapped imported whatever: our thinking, our beings, are to at least some extent an expression of that sick culture. I know this all sounds pretty desperate, but I don’t believe that humans are innately irredeemable wastes of space. I still feel that it’s possible for us to find different ways of being, of relating, of collaborating, and arguably it’s through first seeing and then daring to name the problem(s) and bring them into the light that we can start that shift, if indeed we do start to shift at all. There is, to wildly understate the point, a lot of healing to be done.
*
A theme crops up in talking to people who have been ill a long time – not with life-shortening illnesses, but with life-limiting ones. There’s this subtle balance to be struck between not giving up hope that you’re ever going to get well and accepting that this is the life that you’re actually living in, with all its frustrations and limitations. Within that new life there’s still a huge amount of beauty and pleasure and joy to be experienced, and to be given, to be shared. This is a delicate thing, and not something I can pretend to be particularly skilled at. But amidst the bitterness and frustration at the unfairness of everything, at your own shocking lack of capacity, at the strange happy-sadness of watching your contemporaries start families or get promotions or go on holidays while your precious and limited hours tick inexorably past in the strange stasis of the sickroom – a muffled timeless cocoon where you seem, against nature, to age without growth or change – there are real joys. I find that it is possible, at least at times, to focus on these and to be both happy and grateful for all the wonderful things that remain to me, here in the ashes of my former life.
For our Becoming Human series, poet and editor Cate Chapman writes about the parallels between navigating long-term illness and a planet and a people in a state of chronic crisis.
dark-mountain.net/sick/
or Kate, Caroline, Debs, Toots and Sammy – may all happiness be yours
Being sick absolutely sucks. When you’re sick for a long time, it still sucks. As with grief, you learn over time how to swim through the altered medium of your life with a little more grace than at the floundering start – the cold-shock horror of your head first going under does pass – but it still more or less sucks. You either learn to live within the limitations of a world you previously didn’t know existed, or you struggle in an immensely painful state of denial and frustration. Or maybe, like me, you do a bit of both. Either way, you have fallen, in a very visceral way, from a state of innocence into a state of knowledge, and the knowing is deeply painful.
*
There are so many parallels between the microcosm of chronic illness and the macrocosm of the converging crises of our time. I’m not such an egotist to imagine that they’re of anything like equal consequence (although of course when you’re in a body that feels like it’s falling apart around you, it does feel pretty central) but the one does seem to be a small, dim echo of the other. When I got sick there were a whole bunch of warning signs. I had a strong family history of the same chronic illness I ended up having. On top of this, the people who love me were telling me for months or years that the way that I was living was dangerously unsustainable. For whatever reason, I was unable to hear them. I was a compulsive over-worker, deeply committed to the co-operative I was co-running and totally fixated on the work. Towards the end, my body and brain were cracking under the strain, but I still ploughed on.It’s only too easy to draw the parallels.
The interesting question is why. In setting up the conditions for my particular plummet into ill-health, the reasons I behaved so compulsively are probably wrapped up (rather like everyone else’s compulsive behaviour) in my childhood experiences, as well as in my first (abusive) relationship. The provenance is probably also rooted in a kind of unacknowledged internalised capitalism, an obsession with productivity as the only real measure of value – the killer was that my productivity obsession was focused on creating social and ecological good. I thought I’d escaped the monster, only to find out too late I’d already been swallowed whole. Anyway, for a complex bundle of reasons I was trying to exert my right to exist in the world. Perhaps we all do this in some way. My single-pointedness, my compulsiveness, turned inwards and, combined with unfortunate genetics and sheer bad luck, resulted in my getting sick. Some other people’s single-pointedness and compulsiveness have turned outwards to create or augment the structures that are ravaging our world. We are all at least to some degree a product of our culture, and our culture is sick.
I think in some ways our great catalogue of human horrors and injustices are just manifestations of this one big brokenness. My sickness and the great sickness of our culture are not two separate, unrelated things.The recent outpourings of rage and increasing awareness around big single social justice issues, such as the ‘Me Too’ movement, BLM and the ongoing refugee crisis, are all manifestations of the endemic violence in our culture – of course these specific issues are desperately important and need addressing, but in a way each one represents only the tip of the corporate-capitalist iceberg: this paradigm that through deifying competition and individual gratification encourages domination, control and exploitation in many forms – not just of women by men or black people by white people, but of the global south by industrialised nations, of animals by humans and of the rest of the biosphere through human-created pollution, habitat destruction and climate collapse.
Similarly, in a very real way the chaos, alcoholism and sporadic outbreaks of domestic violence I and my siblings lived with as children, my horribly predictable teenage stumble into a long and abusive relationship with a much older man, my own feelings of lacking value or agency as a young woman – together with infinitely repeated similar experiences of other people – are one small symptom of the same great sickness that is now threatening all life. We are not somehow separate from these problems, either from their provenance or their effects. It’s like that adage about traffic jams: You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. It’s easy to cast ourselves as either victims or perpetrators, as if it’s a binary split.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s more complex than that. Those of us living in the industrialised West are ourselves an expression of the culture that is destroying everything – not just our getting into cars and driving to supermarkets to buy some plastic-wrapped imported whatever: our thinking, our beings, are to at least some extent an expression of that sick culture. I know this all sounds pretty desperate, but I don’t believe that humans are innately irredeemable wastes of space. I still feel that it’s possible for us to find different ways of being, of relating, of collaborating, and arguably it’s through first seeing and then daring to name the problem(s) and bring them into the light that we can start that shift, if indeed we do start to shift at all. There is, to wildly understate the point, a lot of healing to be done.
*
A theme crops up in talking to people who have been ill a long time – not with life-shortening illnesses, but with life-limiting ones. There’s this subtle balance to be struck between not giving up hope that you’re ever going to get well and accepting that this is the life that you’re actually living in, with all its frustrations and limitations. Within that new life there’s still a huge amount of beauty and pleasure and joy to be experienced, and to be given, to be shared. This is a delicate thing, and not something I can pretend to be particularly skilled at. But amidst the bitterness and frustration at the unfairness of everything, at your own shocking lack of capacity, at the strange happy-sadness of watching your contemporaries start families or get promotions or go on holidays while your precious and limited hours tick inexorably past in the strange stasis of the sickroom – a muffled timeless cocoon where you seem, against nature, to age without growth or change – there are real joys. I find that it is possible, at least at times, to focus on these and to be both happy and grateful for all the wonderful things that remain to me, here in the ashes of my former life.