This Mortal Vehicle
June 6, 2009 at 3:13 am (By Amba) (illness, Illness as Metaphor, New Age, sickness, Susan Sontag)
The late Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor to protest the notion that the diseases that strike us have psychological causes or meanings, with its further implication that we somehow bring them on ourselves. A particularly noxious version of such victim-blaming is the New Age belief that we chose the evil things that would happen to us (like being sexually molested at age 3, or gassed at Buchenwald, or getting leukemia) before birth for the sake of lessons we needed to learn, or karmic debts outstanding.
A friend of mine has a delightful rejoinder to that. Courtney (@Courtney1946) is my age and is living with her mother as a caregiver, in a separate city from her own family. That sacrifice makes it seem particularly unfair that she’s been in increasing pain and has just been told she needs to have one or possibly both hips replaced — with no health insurance. No wonder New Age sanctimony annoys her. But I love her solution:
I had not planned on falling apart at 60 or 62, but it seems this body of mine has other ideas. Some of my spiritually inclined friends say that our souls enter bodies and life situations “for a reason”. It ticks me off to hear that. I’m more inclined to believe if we have any predetermined choice at all that it has more to do with other things, like families and friends we belong with or places or work we feel we belong to. Maybe these bodies are like catching a bus. When one comes along that’s going where [you] want, you get on the bus. And if the bus breaks down, you just deal with it. And some of us spend a lot more time trying to get the bus fixed than we planned.
Silly maybe, or my way of rationalizing, but when I was young, I was totally owned by severe chronic migraines and painful gynecological issues. When I had a hysterectomy and then went thru menopause and my migraines almost disappeared, I jumped for joy. I thought I was out of the woods, and just enjoyed living Iife for a few years, never knowing the bus was about to break down again.
Ambiance 
Ron said,
June 6, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Maybe we just have it backwards and should analogize municipal bus lines to various human bodies. Rather than launch into incomprehensible gobbledygook about arrival rates and breakdown times, just say “My bus system is very Jayne Mansfield today”, that is, hot, but 2nd behind a “Monroesque” bus system…
Melinda said,
June 6, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Thaaaaaaank you for posting this. One of the reasons I was afraid to post about my health problems three years ago (but did anyway) was my fear of the New Age numbnuts I’ve met telling me “Wow! You must really want to be sick!”
Ron, I took the Stephen Hawking out of Penn Station this morning.
Donna B. said,
June 6, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Karma is a bad suspension system.
Ron said,
June 6, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Schadenfreude is a bad suspension AND bad brakes!
Rod said,
June 7, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I sincerely doubt we choose our sufferings in life, although our choices in life frequently result in suffering, I do think we have the capacity to learn from the challenges life lays before us. We discover ourselves against the foil of hardship.
amba12 said,
June 7, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Apropos of that, I sometimes wonder where/who I’d be if there had been Prozac et al. when I was a depressed adolescent. I didn’t even know the word “depressed” . . . just thought there was something awfully wrong with me. But I did well in school and didn’t act out (I’d hardly ever heard the word “suicide” in those hush-hush times either; it never crossed my mind) so it wasn’t noticed too much. (My mom noticed, but I didn’t want her input because she was part of the problem at the time … LOL.)
So I just struggled with it on my own. Resisted therapy too (Mom was pushing for it; J pushed against it, probably didn’t want anyone getting too close a look at HIM — LOL again). I often think with more intervention I’d probably be divorced with a couple of kids today like a normal American.
Ron said,
June 7, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I often think with more intervention I’d probably be divorced with a couple of kids today like a normal American.
Boring, and probably true! So look at how more interesting a life you have had!
Perhaps therapy should ditch the ‘health’ model and go for ‘interesting’ instead.
amba12 said,
June 7, 2009 at 2:37 pm
That’s pretty much what the approach of my guy Hillman boils down to.
More here, here, and here.
Some time after connecting so powerfully with his work, I found out that I was born on Hillman’s 20th birthday. (Wow, what a cool way to cheat! Instead of saying new stuff I can just sit here and link to myself!)
Ennui said,
June 7, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Apropos of that, I sometimes wonder where/who I’d be if there had been Prozac et al. when I was a depressed adolescent..
The older I get the closer I draw to Bartleby’s Dead Letter Office. The more decisions you’ve stacked up, the more of them look questionable – at best. And even where you couldn’t possibly have done better under the circumstances, there’s that damned Dead Letter Office. Money that would have saved the store, sent but not received, good tidings thoughtlessly misdelivered, etc. Just the mass of missed connections, roads not taken and so on and so forth. It’s one thing to read about this in a story, quite another to feel it in your bones. The feeling is not exactly regret but rather a kind of awe that such little things, inconsequential in themselves, can have such a massive effect (returning a phone call, not returning a phone call). When I think about this too much, life really does begin to look like a joke made in appallingly bad taste. Another one of the joys of getting older.
For some reason (and here I will circle back to a theme near and dear to this blog, if not precisely on topic for this post), this sense has altered my reading habits. A few years ago, at the dawn of the blogosphere, I read political blogs (and some tech blogs) exclusively. Abstract argument or straight news delivery. I don’t know if the more personal blogs weren’t out there or I just wasn’t interested (maybe a little of both). But now I find myself drawn to blogs like this (and ambivablog before) precisely because you drop so much of you into it. Perhaps, with an increased sense of the importance of conrete detail over abstract ideas, I’m more interested in hearing how other people are navigating life, the unpredictability, hidden traps, unexpected successes, the whole schmear – and what they think about these things taken as a whole. Because it’s a freaking mystery to me.
amba12 said,
June 7, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I think one thing, at least, about roads not taken is that when you’re young you don’t realize that you’re only going to have ONE course through ONE life. There are so many possibilities, it’s hard to believe that you’ll actually only be able to do one thing at a time at each juncture in life, and that that then will be set in the stone of time as the one thing you did (or didn’t).
This is not true of ideas and information; they are a kind of zone of freedom and possibility even now. Learning seems potentially infinite. But it’s true of vital life events: love, marriage, children, friendship, risk or its avoidance. Certain choices you make are irrevocable, though they may be both for better and worse. For example, someone may lose irreplaceable years and relationships and health to addiction, yet finally find an honesty and grounding in recovery that they would never have experienced in a different life. I used to say to a friend in that situation that I wished there was AA for nonalcoholics.
Icepick said,
June 8, 2009 at 1:01 am
So look at how more interesting a life you have had!
I’ve been in several car wrecks, all of which were interesting. The more damage done, the more interesting they were. I once challenged my father to go ahead and punch me in the face, get help for his alcoholism, or get out of our (Mom’s) house. That was also interesting, at least to me as a 13 year-old. It was interesting (and darkly amusing) the day my wife was scared to tell me that one of my brother’s trashy girlfriends had send out letters and email to everyone in the family accusing my mother of molesting my brother (when my brother was in his 50s) and stating flatly that I was the bastard offspring of one of my father’s brothers instead of our (or rather, his) dear old drunken dad. (It was tough for my wife because she had no idea how I would take it. I toke it as a joke and laughed about it. All of those tales must have come from my brother originally, and I found it hysterical that he decided that I was the one that wasn’t my father’s son, as he hated my father about as much as Hitler hated the Jews.)
It was interesting last Tuesday when I got a call from Mom at 6:50 AM telling me that my brother was now dearly departed. Well, that wasn’t interesting. Seeing how well I would do choking back the bile and pretending that he had been anything other than the bastard he had been, THAT was interesting. (I had been mostly successful about that until right now.)
You can have all the interesting in life that you can stomach, pal, but I’ve had enough of interesting. I’d like my dose of boring now, please, and I’ll gladly take any boring that anyone else doesn’t want.
Rod said,
June 8, 2009 at 3:04 am
Ice: There are a few people too central to our lives to ignore. Siblings, parents, spouses and children are usually among them. When one of them betrays you, or is simply impossible, the pain and frustration are difficult to endure. It is usually not our enemies who hurt us the most, but rather those with whom we have a special bond, who break it.
amba said,
June 8, 2009 at 11:20 am
That’s from the horse’s mouth, Ice.
Rod said,
June 9, 2009 at 2:44 am
There is an equally pernicious “Christian” version of the New Age argument that you have chosen your illnesses. It is the suggestion that you just aren’t righteous enough to be healed.The practitioners of the Prosperity Gospel would point to Mathew 7:7, which says,
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
On this verse, which I always have taken to refer to faith or revelation, the argument would be made that God wants to heal everybody; that all proper prayers must necessarily be answered in the affirmative. The poor afflicted soul is accosted by well meaning acolytes, who leave her feeling as though she would be instantly healed if she just said the prayers right, or forgave some deeply buried transgression, or knew the secret handshake.
Illness begets spiritual crisis.