Behold! My work-in-progress!
For fourteen years I was bedridden, an old lady in a young woman’s body. It started with what the doctor told me was a mild case of mononucleosis, stretched into chronic fatigue syndrome, then commingled and finally morphed into multiple chemical sensitivity.
My healing began when I read Jean Strauss’s brilliant feminist biography of Alice James. Alice, the neurasthenic sister of great American writer Henry, and great American thinker William, was my 19th-century cohort. Both of us were bedridden, struck down by mysterious illnesses that left us incapacitated by fatigue. I wondered if her illness and mine might be one and the same.Why was I sick? Why was she? My doctor told me I was “just depressed,†but was it really so simple? Were these illnesses, Alice’s and mine, simply the psychosomatic conjurings of weak minds? Or was there something more to the story?For six years I have researched these, and related, questions. My intent was to write an authoritative third person analysis of “chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, and the 19th century illness neurasthenia, as biopsychosocial responses to industrialism.†But when finally I began to write last winter I found myself stymied. Was it a symptoms of my illness, the brain fog that obscured the words I hoped to retrieve? I set the project down and before I knew it another winter had set in. I came at it again. Again: stuck. What was wrong? I spent a long weekend in retreat, holed up in bed watching movies and reading for pleasure, and came out with a new plan.I determined to go about this book a different way. Suddenly it seemed integral to what I had set out to do to let down the veil between reader and author, to integrate my own story into the narrative that would unfold in these pages. After all, the book I meant to write was a biopsychosocial treatise, a social critique, a reconciliation of history to the here and now, of the personal to the political. What better conduit to that end than my own personal narrative?When I was first sick my doctor told me it was all in my head. Invisible illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) leave their bearers with the burden of proof, as if what they experience in their bodies doesn’t exist. I had been trying to write this book as though my body didn’t exist. But it does, and my body and my mind and my environment all have an impact on what I put down on these pages, and how, and when.I owe a debt to British author Geoff Dyer, who found himself unable to write “a sober and academic study†of D.H. Lawrence, so instead he produced Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a memoir/travelogue documenting his inability to write the book he intended. In these blogs, should you choose to subscribe, you will witness, firsthand, as I fail repeatedly, flagrantly, hopelessly, to write the “sober, academic study†I had in mind.
