Writer and intellectual Susan Sontag, in her book Illness as Metaphor, wrote of this obligation to be sick in our lives. And she also wrote that to decorate our illness with metaphors and melodramas was to make matters worse. "Illness is not a metaphor," she wrote. "The most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking."
For her, stripping illness of its storytelling power was a treatment.
[--]
The first treatment is one we administer on our own and continue to administer throughout illness. A symptom arises, and then we treat ourselves by deciding what we think about it. "It's nothing," we might say. Is a pain that we call "nothing" a metaphor? Sometimes this is enough, because sometimes—usually—the symptoms do indeed go away. The symptoms are symptoms of "nothing."
But the first treatment is like standing on the tip of a pyramid. Hope, delusion, and reasoned expectation all meet in a point. Which of the three faces will you tumble down when you lose your balance?
Of the three faces of that first treatment, hope is the most frightening. Delusion finds its end, somewhere. A doctor, a new symptom, a new pain. When you treat your illness with hope, you might never stop falling.
My mother tried hope—which she later discovered was not actually hope at all—for a long time. Too long, some people have said to me. She "should" have gone to the doctor sooner.
[---]
When you're sick, you know it because your attention shows up, unbidden, somewhere strange on your body. In your aching forehead. In your laboring lungs. In a tumbling discomfort just below your navel. But many people who end up with a serious diagnosis had no symptoms. People fear seeing their doctor because they fear an unexpected pronouncement. The word origin of "diagnosis" is "to recognize." What is being recognized is the hope or curse instilled by a way of looking and thinking. When you find out you have or may have a secret asymptomatic disease, suddenly your attention shows up in the diagnosed location. You touch that part of your body. You look at it in the mirror. You think into it.
[---]
A question that is bound up in illness for us: Who's to blame? If the person who chooses to pray as treatment dies of cancer, is it their fault? If so, isn't the same true for someone who chooses chemotherapy for cancer and dies of cancer?
People will be quick to tell you that some attitudes toward health are "dangerous." This is true. They're all dangerous.
Between two cancers, my mother used a hormone cream to help her have sex more easily. Later, some people in my family suspected that this resurrected the first cancer. I have no thoughts either way about this. My mother was also depressed, she was constantly having dental work done, she didn't exercise often, and she ate a lot of sugar. These are all "reasons" why some people say she might have gotten cancer. Responsibility and its harsh twin, blame, are treatment for anxiety.
But what if we eat raw food? What if we drink enough water, if we take vitamins, if we sleep well, if we exercise, if we meditate, if we go on "retreats," if we take psychedelic plants, if we get massages, if we become vegetarians, if we eat more organ meats, if we force ourselves to laugh, if we take morning walks?
We try to avoid illness and treatment, and in avoiding it create a constant state of illness and treatment.
- More beautiful and insightful words from Susan Sontag's daughter Conner Habib here
For her, stripping illness of its storytelling power was a treatment.
[--]
The first treatment is one we administer on our own and continue to administer throughout illness. A symptom arises, and then we treat ourselves by deciding what we think about it. "It's nothing," we might say. Is a pain that we call "nothing" a metaphor? Sometimes this is enough, because sometimes—usually—the symptoms do indeed go away. The symptoms are symptoms of "nothing."
But the first treatment is like standing on the tip of a pyramid. Hope, delusion, and reasoned expectation all meet in a point. Which of the three faces will you tumble down when you lose your balance?
Of the three faces of that first treatment, hope is the most frightening. Delusion finds its end, somewhere. A doctor, a new symptom, a new pain. When you treat your illness with hope, you might never stop falling.
My mother tried hope—which she later discovered was not actually hope at all—for a long time. Too long, some people have said to me. She "should" have gone to the doctor sooner.
[---]
When you're sick, you know it because your attention shows up, unbidden, somewhere strange on your body. In your aching forehead. In your laboring lungs. In a tumbling discomfort just below your navel. But many people who end up with a serious diagnosis had no symptoms. People fear seeing their doctor because they fear an unexpected pronouncement. The word origin of "diagnosis" is "to recognize." What is being recognized is the hope or curse instilled by a way of looking and thinking. When you find out you have or may have a secret asymptomatic disease, suddenly your attention shows up in the diagnosed location. You touch that part of your body. You look at it in the mirror. You think into it.
[---]
A question that is bound up in illness for us: Who's to blame? If the person who chooses to pray as treatment dies of cancer, is it their fault? If so, isn't the same true for someone who chooses chemotherapy for cancer and dies of cancer?
People will be quick to tell you that some attitudes toward health are "dangerous." This is true. They're all dangerous.
Between two cancers, my mother used a hormone cream to help her have sex more easily. Later, some people in my family suspected that this resurrected the first cancer. I have no thoughts either way about this. My mother was also depressed, she was constantly having dental work done, she didn't exercise often, and she ate a lot of sugar. These are all "reasons" why some people say she might have gotten cancer. Responsibility and its harsh twin, blame, are treatment for anxiety.
But what if we eat raw food? What if we drink enough water, if we take vitamins, if we sleep well, if we exercise, if we meditate, if we go on "retreats," if we take psychedelic plants, if we get massages, if we become vegetarians, if we eat more organ meats, if we force ourselves to laugh, if we take morning walks?
We try to avoid illness and treatment, and in avoiding it create a constant state of illness and treatment.
- More beautiful and insightful words from Susan Sontag's daughter Conner Habib here
No comments:
Post a Comment