Magical Thinking: Finding a Way Back to the Body

BY JENNIFER BROUGH

“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.”

Autumn arrives, at last, in explosions of red, orange, and yellow. Night creeps in sooner and small crackles of change electrify the air. Leaves fall echoing circular motions of death and, soon enough, gentle rebirth. In a year so fractured with continual threats to life, through health and politically corrupt structures worldwide, the seasonal shift and recently passed samhain provide much-needed anchors in times that are easy to feel adrift in.

Realising that the year is almost over, I am - as I imagine others will be - still trying to find footing against a backdrop of low-level anxiety, violence on a global scale, and fears of what the future will unveil. As the natural world is entering its cycle of decay, I feel a growing sense of invigoration. In addition to enjoying my favourite season and kindling flames of inspiration from the work of activists, artists, and writers, I am now fully recovered from a long-awaited operation for endometriosis. As my body is expanding in its range of capabilities, I feel not a sense of return to myself, but a new series of openings slowly unfolding.

Dissociation

Many chronic illness sufferers will be familiar with Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, and the “kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick”. The former is all around us, institutionalised in gyms, doctors’ surgeries, stores, and diet plans. The wellness industrial complex has extended its tendrils into every area of consumable content, promising continual health - or the idea of it - in exchange for clean eating, charcoal, burpees, and multiple other methods. This kingdom feels even larger when you stand outside its drawbridge, and my ushering into the other, bleaker realm was not a gentle one.

Six years ago, I woke in blistering pain. I showered, vomited, and, bent double, phoned the National Health Service helpline for advice. A suspected ruptured appendix later became a twisted fallopian tube cutting off the blood supply to my right ovary. An uncommon, deeply uncomfortable event. That night in the hospital bed, as I swam in a tramadol haze, the pain suddenly stopped. The surgery was the following morning, but by then the ovary had ‘died’, as the surgeon told me post-op. She explained that, “a normal ovary is white, like a golf ball, but yours…” then showed me a photograph of a purple apple-sized mass. “Oh, right,” I replied, mentally adrift. “You can still have children,” she assured me, but it was hard to accept this token of relief. I asked what they did with the ovary, wondering if it had already been burned away or was floating in a jar somewhere. I don’t remember her exact answer, but the word disposed bubbles up.

Since that incident something internal had shifted and, a year later, the pain resumed. The officious surgeon I sat across from mentioned the possibility of endometriosis and scheduled another operation. She was right. The endometriosis was mild, ablated away, and I was stitched up and sent home. I remember taking the bus back from the hospital feeling that familiar separation. After another physical removal of infected tissue, I felt a mental removal from myself. I tried not to dwell in that darkening space.

The problem with endometriosis, however, is that it can grow back at any time - even if managed with hormones. I, like many other people living with it, have become a minor expert in this condition, advocating for bodily autonomy and the best course of treatment. The process is disheartening and tiring, and can make the body feel like an uncooperative machine. In living with endometriosis, alongside fibromyalgia, my body became a source of blame. It was the reason my social life suffered, intimacy became strained, and it acted as a brake on any form of spontaneity. Only recently, after much therapy, I realised the need to reclaim my body, to learn to live in it, as well as with it, anew.

Division

After my most recent laparoscopy, suspended between waking and dreaming, I saw two dark green frogs sat on my chest. Their glassy eyes looked up unblinking. When I came around properly, I searched for what the appearance of frogs in dreams mean - transformation and renewal. Sometimes metaphors write themselves.

Despite the chronic nature of this illness, transforming my thinking beyond a binary approach to wellness has been necessary to keep going. Pain and its management are seldom either/or states. Instead pain is shades of a spectrum; some days are manageable and I am active, others are better suited to staying in bed. I initially resisted identifying myself as ‘disabled’, believing I was unworthy of the designation. Part of this emerges from a need to categorise phenomena in our search for meaning - to define something as this or that - but also a lifelong struggle with being ‘enough’. Redefining how I see and accept myself is overdue, an act that won’t be completed quickly. 

Part of this redefinition extends outside of self-care to how I’ve come to define the concept of care as a collective verb. Feminist movements have been historically predicated on group efforts, in which each person has a role and is supported by others. As the pandemic presses on the most vulnerable in our society, mutual aid groups have organised food parcels, rent strikes, and fundraising in the absence of meaningful action from governments. The patient/doctor experience also operates on a similar top-down structure, and I have been bolstered by finding virtual communities and friends through online spaces of care. We’ve exchanged tips and tricks when in those medical offices, signed each other’s petitions, and created art centred around disability. The latter especially has been particularly restorative. Not only do these projects offer artistic and experiential solidarity, but give us the room to indicate towards the worlds we desire, a vague map of how we write them into existence. 

The three division mark scars I bear on my pelvis serve as a reminder of the necessity to collapse separation between several areas; be it the medical either/or of the kingdoms of the well and the sick; the dissociation between acknowledging and responding to the needs of my body; or the experience of sickness as an individual, instead of a part of a shared group.

Deep Diving

Outside of these groups and creative practices, two friends and I have formed a coven. A place where we mostly watch horror films, discuss tarot, and share memes and art. On the day of the most recent new moon, my friend led a ritual of letting go and rebirth. Over Whatsapp, we spent half an hour meditating, writing down what we hoped for, and what we wanted to purge ourselves of. After folding our papers up tightly, we burned each piece. I felt my body move as I breathed, where pain niggled and how it sat in relation to the rest of my being. Something shifted.   

Perhaps not as intense as The Craft, but our coven’s ritual proved deeply emotional nonetheless. Not just because of the things we ablated, but the act of carving out time for oneself and others frees the subconscious to become unstuck. Allowing oneself to take time and reveal desires to ourselves forfeits certainty. More so, it allows vulnerability. To feel what it means to really inhabit the bodies we are in. In these small sacred acts, there is room for the chaotic, the uncontrolled, and this is deeply liberating.

A few days after the ritual, I came across a line from the poet June Jordan:

“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.”

I interpret telling the truth as a continual, reflective act, a mode of being to carry in each place we occupy - alone or as part of a group. Telling the truth about how the world is, and how you are within it, allows the lines of stability and categoriSation to blur. Telling the truth is, as Jordan says, a process of becoming. For me, it has been recognising that while I have muted these inner feelings of loss or disappointment, they always catch up. In leaning into the darker parts through meditative moments and online spaces, I can feel the raw nerve endings of bodily acceptance pulsing, and possibility glitters. 

Jennifer Brough is a writer and editor living in London. Her work has most recently appeared in perhappened, Artsy, and Barren Magazine. She curates creative submissions for Sisters of Frida, an experimental collective of disabled women. You can find her on Twitter @jennifer_brough or jenniferlbrough.com.