Notes to Self
Since the age of twenty-seven, I’ve experienced chronic pelvic pain. It’s been unsusceptible to treatment—and for many years, to diagnosis. Before I published Life is Hard, almost no-one knew this about me; now you can read it in a book.
While writing it, I did six months of pelvic floor therapy, with the tepid endorsement of my urologist. The first session was largely diagnostic, beginning with questions from a friendly physical therapist:
Do you have difficulty urinating?
How often do you go in a typical night?
Do you feel like your internal organs are falling out of your body through your anus?
I enjoyed the Mad Libs quality of question three: “Do you feel your lungs ascending through your elbows? Your eyeballs exiting through your ears?” Every so often, a patient must thrill to the unexpected precision: “Yes, that is exactly what I feel.” Maybe if I’d answered yes, physical therapy would have worked; instead, it made me focus on my pain, and thinking about it only made it worse.
An odd transition: going from private to public so abruptly. I find it easier to write about my condition than to talk about it with friends. And writing about it has been helpful, though it’s hard to say exactly how.
It’s more obvious why it helps to learn about others’ chronic pain: there is comfort in companionship, in feeling less alone—given keys to the invisible kingdom of the chronically ill. It was in part to raise awareness, share solidarity, and mitigate embarrassment for others that I wrote about my condition in Life is Hard.
Among my favourite moments of stand-up by my favourite comedian Stewart Lee is a digression on his experience with diverticulitis:
So I was being wheeled in there, I was lying on a slab, and I was naked except for this kind of third-length, floral-print hospital gown. And I had a fibre-optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus. And then suddenly out of nowhere, and this is true, the doctor said, ‘Oh, I see from your notes that you’re a famous comedian.’ … And then the nurse interrupted rather aggressively. She went, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of you,’ as if it were I that had arrogantly introduced this vain notion into the endoscopic procedure, which was not the case. … So I said to her, ‘Well, I am a comedian.’ And she said, ‘Well, you don’t look like a comedian.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘A comedian should look funny.’
Now, at the time I was lying naked on a slab in a third-length, floral-print hospital gown, with a fibre-optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus. If I’d seen that, I would have laughed. But I suppose if you work in endoscopy, you run the risk of becoming jaded.
One of the gifts of humour is the alchemy that turns what might be shame into shared laughter. To write about chronic pelvic pain is to borrow that miracle, or try to. But there is something more elusive going on.
Towards the end of Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts how the written word was offered to the King of Egypt by a god: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory.” But the King demurred: “[as] the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are.”
In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.
The complaint is that writing will make us forget, as we forgo the inner speech of memory, outsourcing information storage and retrieval—a phenomenon amplified by google searches and GPS.
Yet what if we want to forget? Might the written word quell the tyranny of intrusive thoughts? There is something in this, I believe: to write an experience down is to externalize it, to place it at a distance from oneself. It reminds me of a tactic we used when our kid was younger and more prone to perseveration: write down what is bothering you on a scrap of paper, then crumple it and throw it in the trash.
This is the best I can do to put the benefit of writing into words—though I don’t think it quite makes sense. I feel as though I’m straining for a point I cannot touch, my lungs ascending through my elbows, eyeballs exiting through my ears—a power of the written word that has to do with separation from oneself, with thoughts made into symbols, symbols into shapes, with lived reality as ephemeral as a scribble and as permanent as a fact.