some thoughts after reading…

Virginia Woolf | On Being Ill | ERIS gems

For beings destined to roam this earth in a body, we spend an astonishing amount of time and energy ignoring our vessel. We tend to idealize the body by embarking on quests to perfect it, while also pretending that our bodies are of no importance as our main focus stays on the mind.

The crux of an embodied experience as a human is to pay attention to the body, in tandem with emotions, spirit and mind. Woolf mentions how the body intervenes; suggesting that there is an imagined or desired status quo that is interrupted when a body presents as ill. She goes on to say that it takes courage, to examine that body in its most vulnerable state. I agree wholeheartedly.

Imagine, all this time has passed since Woolf wrote this text in 1926 and illness or disability as topics in literature are still mostly uncharted territory. There is an uptake of crip authors in whose work one can find a unique perspective on the construct of embodiment society values, though this is a sub-culture that has originated in the English-speaking parts of the world that mainly draws an online following.

Woolf’s finding still holds; when wanting to present clearly what being ill is like, there is “a poverty of the language”. Within the Dutch vocabulary specifically, most words describing illness (or recovery for that matter) have ableist tropes built in. The words commonly used are linking back to either ‘being valid’ - or not.

If there is no language developed, the lived experience cannot be shared and a person seeking care cannot advocate for themselves, or emancipate toward a position of agency in relation to treatment. The position of the sick within the social hierarchical structure is stagnant. An example: doctors are still asking patients to grade their pain, on a scale of one to ten - that is about as much creativity allowed in a doctor’s office. Sure, some people refer to their experience of pain as a throbbing sensation, an intermittent stinging or a building of pressure. Yet, these embodied sensations are so subjective - shouldn’t we have as many descriptions of our bodies hurting as there are people?

With being sick comes a brutal honesty, there is no energy to keep up appearances or continue a fast pace - all aspects of being human slow down drastically. Having stepped off of the ferris wheel of what is considered ‘the norm’, the newfound horizontality offers literally a new perspective that makes the previous ways of moving through the world almost seem ridiculous. Woolf mentions how being immersed in a vocabulary can render us oblivious to what we sound like. Getting acquainted with a new language is a gift of a new meaning making process. Completely supportive of this conclusion.

Virginia Woolf lost me in the second half of the book. Here she supposes rashness to be an attribute of illness, and connects it to both well established literature and a pages-long deep dive into two female characters and their lack of emotional expression. I am curious to learn if that segment surprises me with new insights, when I revisit it some other time.

“He is forced to coin words himself,
taking his pain in one hand and a lump of sound in the other (…),
so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.”