Thursday 15 July 2010

Illness is the Nightside of Life

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 only 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


I think my body is punishing me for running a marathon. Since I crossed the finish line and stopped pounding pavement, my body started pounding me.

Take that! it said as I hacked up phelgm from a chest infection.

You don't know the meaning of pain, it taunted as my throat swelled red and raw.

Here's dehydration for ya
, it sung as I prayed to the Porcelain God.

Vengeful huh?


The result of having been sick on and off for two months is that I am now on extended rest leave from work on Doctor's Orders. For one week.

As much as I do not like being sick, there is value in it. Sickness can be a sort of communion with oneself. When thoughts or ideas that you have been too busy to attend to in the frenzy of daily life, have an opportunity to surface. Sickness makes us be still.

It's great.

From stillness comes ideas, creativity and regeneration. I've barely left the house all week yet I've been more productive and stimulated than in the longest while.

As long as I get better after the week that is. After that, not so great.

Chronic illness, the type of inflictions which make people flinch or look blank when they come up in conversation is no-one's idea of a good time. Illness that lingers or has no cause nor cure. It tips a person from the land of the living into a strange subterranean territory where you are utterly alone with your character and conscience.

It's terrifying.

If you recover and re-emerge, blinking and shaken from the long time spent in that murky land, you are changed forevermore. The life lessons you get about yourself and those around you whilst chronically ill are unlike any other.

The challenge is to live well after that. Which I hope, most do.

Because I for one sure as hell don't want another visit to that hard and lonely land.