Day Two
Think positive. Heal yourself. “Today is the beginning of my new life”. Shot of butterfly being released from open hands. “Today my faith is restored”. Picture of beautiful sunset. I had to turn the music off, I couldn’t stand it. Now, I do know – because I watched her other videos on YouTube – that this poor girl has been suffering. But now she has seen the light because she was told by a “friend” she should do so and she made a video, so we could share her experience.
But I’m with Barbara Ehrenreich on this one. Positive thinking cannot cure you. It cannot stop pain. In fact, if you’re feeling particularly depressed and frustrated, then it is unbelievably annoying to hear people say that you should stop being so negative. What is there to be positive about? That you are not starving and have a roof over your head? There is always someone worse off than you. If I had that attitude then I could never complain about anything. How can we change the world for the better if we never see its faults? I can’t set about finding a cure for my sickness by denying that my sickness is BAD. It stinks, it hurts, I don’t like it, I want to be rid of it. I want to get better.
And another thing that Barbara Ehrenreich said that is so reasonable it made me shout out loud YES: it shows a huge empathy deficit in our society. If you’re sick, “it must be because you sent out the wrong vibrations to the universe”. Don’t tell me about your problems, I don’t want to hear about them. Watch people’s eyes glaze over when you truthfully answer the question “how are you?”
I love it when my husband sings “armes Häschen bist du krank, dass du nicht mehr hüpfen kannst?” best of all.
Okay, I hear you say: she’s justifying slumping into a state of depression and doing nothing. Well, I have this to say back again. The predominant emotions involved in chronic sickness are anger and frustration. That is why I am writing this blog. That is why Farrah Fawcett Majors let her death be filmed for all to see. There are some glaring misconceptions about people who are suffering. One is that they should suffer gladly, and if they complain out loud then they are depressed.
I am angry. Really, really angry. I hate these little monsters living in the corners of my body, that invaded me and then hide when I come at them intravenously with the chemical bludgeon that flattens everything in sight. There is something so horribly clever about them. They have found the places to go that are out of the reach of medical science. They can transform themselves into impenetrable balls, like a hedgehog, when they are discovered and stay like that for up to a year, frozen, until you think you are healthy again and then BAM! They unroll and multiply and the whole odyssey begins again.
But it is not just the anger and horror at the internal drama being enacted inside my body that takes up emotional space. It is the rage and frustration at the medical community, the so-called health system. Not even able to diagnose a disease that about half a million people are getting each year in Germany alone, until it is perhaps too late to do anything meaningful about it. There is talk of this illness reaching epidemic proportions already and yet there are hardly any doctors treating these patients. Man, I could go on and on and on. You’re bored? So am I.
Sometimes I dream that I am running. I am incredibly agile, I can jump and climb. There are even dreams where I can fly, although they are very seldom. But when I wake up, trapped in this body that goes nowhere much, except to the doctors, I think – at least I can do anything in my dreams that I want. My mind can go anywhere I like. So where will we go today?
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