A Note from the Creator: A Poetic Prose on Illness

Everyone knows the experience of being ill. It’s a part of the human condition: from the moment that oxygen enters our wet lungs and light penetrates our closed eyelids, our infant bodies are exposed to the unforgiving natural world. And in the process of life and growing as we do, we inevitably face the possibility of falling ill, subject to the state of our working bodies and racing minds.

It’s the lingering wind chill that left a poor, sniffling nose for two weeks. The childhood colds filled with memories of sweet, bubblegum-pink medicine. Most recently, I can trace back the idea of illness with the wild spread of a pandemic. The illness of an infectious hysteria, dread and paranoia that accompanies the spread of disease.

Clearly, our lives are shaped most poignantly by moments of weakness and vulnerability- by times of illness.

And yet, much discourse on illness resides within the domain of medicine, its pharmaceutical language and unquestioned confidence, offering no room for ambiguity. The cold, calcified language of symptoms inspires imagery of white coats, sterile rooms and the fear of uncertainty. We don’t talk about the suffering of a fever as much as we relay medical jargon of symptoms ("body aches" or "loss of appetite") as if they were removed from us and our physical being. We don’t talk about the selfhood of illness- the intersection of mind and body, and its effect on our lives.

In On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf writes illness as the great confessional. In the childish outspokenness of illness, she says, “things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Call this the truth of illness. The body intervenes, while the creature behind the glass can only gaze out, absorbing the intensity of physical and emotional extremes. It is the suffering of the self (the creature behind the glass body) that goes widely unheard by others.

The intent of this blog is not only to highlight different illness narratives and develop a more layered understanding of health, illness and healing, but to attune to the human experience. Through language, how can we begin to understand the ways in which illness is felt in the body, and how is that reconciled by the one who suffers? By hearing these stories and measuring their depth through reading, what then becomes the responsibility of the healer?

In the end, language becomes the medium through which we make sense of ourselves, of others, and of the world around us. Reading will allow us to meet others with the care that we recognize is needed when one survives the pains of illness. This will call upon our own empathy; to say not, “I know exactly what you feel,” but to say, “I know you suffer, and I am with you.”

​- Tabitha Hiyane