It was the top of page 212 that unlocked the floodgates I had been blinking back all day:
For people who are in continual pain, the relationship with bodily risk is different. Pain is not a healthful by-product of healthy exertion or impressive effort: it is a constant companion. You want to limit your time with pain, not encourage it.
For people who live with fatigue, the relationship with effort is different. Exhaustion is not a healthful by-product of healthy exertion or impressive effort: it is a constant companion. You want to preserve yourself from fatigue, not encourage it.
— Polly Atkin: Some of Us Just Fall
Anyone — and it probably is a one (so thank you, dear reader!) — who has followed this blog over the last eleven years or so (even when it has vanished into the haze of forgetfulness, or weirdly veered down the path less travelled by) will understand my cathartic tears: disability, along with (for me) its constituents pain, fatigue (sans sleep), and an overwhelming desire to walk (when I shouldn’t), are the chief characters found amongst the subplots cunningly pushed through these pages, as they are throughout my life. Since three other motorists did their best to render me immobile (or worse), and (much later) my heart suddenly stopped (ostensibly because of a drug I was taking to alleviate one of the main aspects of the disability caused by those earlier collisions, but actually caused by a congenital genetic mutation), disability and illness have become intertwined both in my life and in my mind (although possibly in different ways). They have also become my necessary guides (although possibly not always in a good way).
This is all difficult (at least for me) to express, to communicate: and my occasionally frequent attempts to do so — although I have yet to thoroughly confront in print the cardiac arrest that nearly locked me away for good… — frequently end in frustration (as witnessed by the large sheaf of unfinished drafts squatting on my phone and laptop). There is a tough balance to be found concerning long lists of symptoms and medications; of incidents that may be off-putting; descriptions that may be too personal; terms that may be too technical or medical; experiences that — for those who are not similarly damaged — may be difficult to sympathize with, or impossible to empathize with. Plus, of course, this all requires the skill to find that balance in the first place; the talent to then keep all five balls in the air simultaneously; as well as the time and energy to commit it to ink or pixel whilst, of course, continuously living through it all (and not sounding miserable).
Polly Atkin has that skill, that talent: both indeed, in swimmingly deep abundance. Weaving her experiences with those of other family members (however extended) over many centuries, and with local histories; conjuring up beautiful portraits of key locations — all gravitationally-centred on the wonder that is Grasmere, and the deeply-layered common above the amazing Dove Cottage (with Wordsworth therefore making an occasional entrance) — clarifying complex medical science in ways that draw you in… she creates tall, transformational, revelatory stacks of beautiful, tantalizing, informative and yet utterly poetic swatches: which, when carefully and thoughtfully sewn together — often with a thread of dark, wry humour — form a narrative quilt full of shimmering, pulsing colours and touchable textures. Wrap yourself in it, as you must, and you will find yourself deeply immersed in what it is to be her; what it is to be.
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I’m longing for the agony to stop
Oh, let the happiness in
— David Sylvian: Let the happiness in
In some ways it is a comforting book (and I have been uncommonly calm and happy since reading it): demonstrating that I am/you are not alone in your experiences and struggles. But, in so many more ways, it is harrowing… – so many medics believing that no complaints can possibly exist outside of their specialism consigning Polly (and me) to years of what amounts to torture through their ignorance and arrogance (two sides of the same dull, utterly worn coin).
Her inclusion of that “thread of dark, wry humour” produces a long chain of wonderful lights strung along the way, though: not so much flickering in the dark, to guide us, because this is not a dark book, despite its principal subject; but as a fundamental part of the book’s wide-ranging enlightenment. It is a fundamentally necessary book, that should have been written a long time ago, perhaps: but one that waited patiently for an author with the requisite magic and understanding; the crucial scholarly context and powers; a novel, beautiful, painterly way with words, and – perhaps – a deeper connection to the Earth and its histories than most. “The world needs your stories, told your way” she writes in her acknowledgements, at the end, addressing the “fellow disabled and chronically ill writers” she has learned from. And this is one such exemplar. It is not just a book for people like me (a “not-quite-human”), or even people like you — it is for everyone.
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Her chapter on pacing — one of those “transformational stacks” — is thoroughly illuminating: and I gleaned more from its pages than from decades of pain management and expert patient programmes. With huge gratitude, and a big smile, I shall therefore re-read this section until that learning is well and truly rammed into the gaps inside my skull.
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Indirectly, this book also helped solve the puzzle of my life-long resistance to local anaesthetic (which is a characteristic of one of the congenital conditions Polly suffers from): pushing me to plausibly connect it to my congenital Brugada syndrome (which my catastrophic cardiac arrest revealed). Two minutes of research, and I had the answer: they are both caused by a mutation on the same gene. However – as I have found throughout my life – cardiologists and anaesthetists are but two of the many blind men examining this white elephant: drawing their own singular, disconnected, conclusions. It will therefore be interesting to see if I am listened to, this time; or if my lack of a medical degree precludes me from any meaningful dialogue (as detailed again and again in this book; and as I have found all too repeatedly myself).
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Grasmere was the answer, wasn’t it?
— Polly Atkin: Some of Us Just Fall
Polly apologized (unnecessarily — although I obviously understood why) on Bluesky for her book “resonating so much” with me, when I posted my initial reaction. I’m glad it did, and still does; and always will. One of those resonances is the lure, the enticement, the seduction of the Lake District and its nature, similarly experienced by Thomas De Quincey (a strand which is wonderfully interlocked throughout with her own). It is possible that we both (all) may have fallen into the same, well, not quite trap, so much, but maybe under the same, or similar, spells: mine stretching back to my teenage Saturdays yomping up and over, around and along, the mountains here that are now known as Wainwrights.
I moved to the Lakes three-and-a-half years ago not for “The Nature Cure” as such — a term and social media bragging-point that Polly rightfully and wrathfully derides and deflates — but with an internalized orison of sorts that simply being here would at least help; that those glorious mountains, or just the lakes, would lure me out of the house more frequently than anywhere else. If not to walk, maybe just to photograph or sketch, or pen bad poetry. Despite my disabilities. It couldn’t do any harm, could it?
But, so far, drowning under a tsunami of migraines (and medical appointments that lead nowhere slowly), all “being here” has done is define what others could possibly perceive as weaknesses… – especially my ‘failure’ to get out walking more than every two or three months; and certainly my ‘failure’ to ascend more than a few metres in height each time. But these aren’t failures to me (anymore): well, apart from a failure of realism when I uttered my prayer (but kept it bundled inside my heart). That I am here, doing whatever it is that I do — or don’t — is one heck of an achievement. How Polly does all the things she does is also downright astounding. I am in awe, I must admit (whilst crying my eyes out at all the doors simultaneously slamming closed into her fragile body). And I am in a position — usually sitting or lying down — at least, of having experienced a portion of her pains and problems. (This is no competition, though. However, please do feel free to read my earlier rant on the subject.)
I wouldn’t want to be anyone else, anywhere else.
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