Perfect Book Pairing: All’s Well & The Invisible Kingdom
Chronic illnesses are on the rise, particularly autoimmune diseases, and in world where disconnection is the standard, books like these have a chance at helping us move toward healing. Because you can’t survive through hardship without a community and systems that see the hardship too and are willing to walk with you through the unknown, toward healing.
Yas Crawford. 2019. Oxygen Ib
“How are we doing? he’ll ask as I approach, but he’s already walking away from me toward the treatment room down the hall, my ever-fattening file tucked under his arm. Because he already know how I am. No better, never any better. One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making. Who refuses to believe in little victories. A fire he’s been valiantly trying to put out, but then I constantly, brazenly, insist upon erupting into flames again.”
-All’s Well by Mona Awad
Miranda in Mona Awad’s novel All’s Well is stuck in a body of pain, in a world where people don’t believe in, and often don’t care about, her pain. Until, suddenly, in a surreal turn of events, someone does. Three someone’s. And her pain is lifted. And things get more surreal. To live with chronic pain is to be willing to do almost anything to rid yourself of the pain. This willingness comes, partly, from the world’s denial of your reality. Friends, family, doctors, insurance agencies—all of them seem to mistrust you and for those who believe you, their compassion and understanding run dry as nothing seems to help you. Miranda is at the bottom of that well at the beginning of All’s Well and I so wish I could have handed her a copy of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke and made her dinner while she read it.
Some of the pain that comes from living with a chronic illness and/or pain is the loneliness that accompanies it—particularly doctors and medical professionals—because, like O’Rourke writes, “How could I get better if no one thought I was sick?” She writes about ethical loneliness, which Miranda was most certainly experiencing and which drove her nearly mad. “Ethical loneliness,” according to O’Rourke, “is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.”
This is why books like these two are crucial. Chronic illnesses are on the rise, particularly autoimmune diseases, and in world where disconnection is the standard, books like these have a chance at helping us move toward healing. Because you can’t survive through hardship without a community and systems that see the hardship too and are willing to walk with you through the unknown, toward healing.
“The central issue is that physicians tend not to see women’s self-reports of illness symptoms as valid. When a female patient complains of pain or discomfort, her testimony is viewed as a gendered expression of a subjective emotional issue rather than a reflection of a “hard” objective physiological reality. Even when it comes to a disease as grave as cancer, a woman’s testimony about what she is experiencing is seen as an exaggeration. You can guess what happens, then, when doctors cannot identify the source of the symptoms. One young woman I interviewed told me, “I wish doctors had just looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. But I believe you. And one day we’ll figure it out.’ I would have had so much more confidence in that person. To have the arrogance to believe we know everything about everything! The number of physicians who said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just depressed’—well, it was so demaning.””
-The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke
Unsolaced by Gretel Ehrlich
Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true
To read Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is by Gretel Ehrlich is to be reminded of all the ways we fail personally and globally. But it is not disheartening. In fact, it’s the opposite. It may be titled Unsolaced, but in Ehrlich’s stark and unveiled truth telling I found solace. In her stories about people living on the brink and moving ahead with their chins up anyway, in her stories of the people working to restore our planter for decades before climate change was a part of our vernacular, her stories of her own resilience in the face of unending loss—the heartbeat of this book is keep going, keep trying.
“Loneliness is a lie of the ego, though sometimes the absences mount up into an ache that can’t be ignored. Loneliness ended that night, whooshed away by the embrace of strangers. Unknowingly I had entered an obscure ranching community in which I could keep a writer’s distance but still be included. I could “cowboy” and write. Shell became my heart’s home.”
“Yesterday I was young. Today I’m trying to find a place to live where, as temperature increases, I will be able to find water, grow food, feed animals. I lay out a map of the world and see immediately that the choices are limited, yet I have a choice. Many don’t. Soon, perhaps, such a privilege won’t matter.
Our deep inflexibility seems a kind of foolishness, or worse, suicide, as we rock between acts of heroism and greed, self-discipline and self-indulgence, and at the drop of a hat we can easily persuade ourselves to go either way.
“I guess we’re a failed species,” an acquaintance said after exclaiming there was no such thing as climate change. We’re a failed species despite our unrivaled intelligence, we indulge in delusional behavior to protect ourselves from painful realities. We talk but don’t act. We ask to be spoon-fed, but only the things we want to eat, and make demands on the earth without ever inquiring what the needs of the earth might be.”
“Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true.”
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak
Acts of barbarity can happen fast and on a large scale not when more people turn immoral or evil, not necessarily, but when enough people become numb. When we are indifferent, disconnected, atomised. Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion — the lack of emotion.
Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux. in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will.’
I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom.
Do not be afraid of complexity.
- Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division