Some of Us Just Fall
On Nature and Not Getting Better
Polly Atkin
Having read it
★★★★★
An eloquent and insightful memoir of living with a chronic illness and one that also made clear just how difficult it can be to keep going in, around and even against (so as to show new, more helpful possibilities, for everyone!) some of the pervasive attitudes and approaches that many a system seems driven by, rather than the person seeking some kind of clarity and assistance from it.
The way we talk about illness and disability dictates what is possible for all people who are affected by it. The narrative odds are too often stacked against disabled people. There are two options that seem to be available: triumphal recovery or inspirational death. There are too few stories of continuation. Too few stories of joy. Too few stories of the millions of ordinary ways a disabled life may fold and unfold, like any life.
Overall, this book describes a good, and vital, perspective to life with a chronic illness and one of striving to carrying on and achieve, with a little (or a lot!) of timely defiance where and when possible, for good measure.
It should, at least, make you consider the merits of ongoingness.
To recognise ongoingness speaks not of cure, but of continuation, and the real beauty in that. It speaks of the miracle of agency.
A good passage
Some people ask what is the point of seeking a diagnosis for a condition for which there is no cure. I’ve heard this said by ordinary people, by medical professionals, by members of my own family. To them I repeat: you’re mistaking no cure with no action. No cure with no help. No cure with hopeless. There may be no cure, but there is treatment, there is management, and there is understanding: none of these can be achieved without a correct diagnosis. Diagnosis makes change possible. Diagnosis makes survival possible.
A second good passage
When our own bodies are presented as unnatural, as something to be corrected, both the word ‘Nature’ and the word ‘Cure’ take on sinister connotations.
The things that make me sick are genetic, are part of my own nature – written in and by the smallest parts of me, at the centre of my every cell, part of my diverse internal landscape – so how can any cure that wants to dig them out of me be natural?
Even if it were possible, which it isn’t, cure would be my enemy. Cure wants to undo me. To unmake me, in the name of ‘healing’, in the name of ‘wholeness’, in the name of ‘health’. In the name of natural and normal and well.
The dark side of cure is eradication. Cure wants to remove, to erase difference. Cure wants people like me to not be people like me.
A third good passage
‘Nature’ and ‘Cure’ are both the product of false binaries, of a dualism that is damaging our bodies and our world. We separate things out, choose one lake to be our natural health service, another to be sacrificed in the name of a greener, healthier future. We see no irony in any of this. We are proud of the progress we have made in the name of health, of our bodies and of the planet. We will squeeze the last drop of sap out of nature to make sure we get our cure.