Life-Changing Literary Experience

Viktor Frankl, 1905-1997

I'm going to go ahead and use the words life-changing without quotes or apologies here, for Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.  There aren't many books like this. He asks questions about the meaning of life and suffering that are almost too important to take seriously until it's absolutely unavoidable, but that point of inevitability reaches us all.  This book that gets to the heart of what I'm always asking myself as I come to grips with life in general, and particularly my life with CFS. 

Viktor Frankl has fearsome credentials for talking about the meaning of life. He was a Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna in the 1930s, working on his philosophy of "logotherapy" when he was taken prisoner and sent to Auschwitz. Although he barely survived the camp, he came out of it with his faith in his ideas strengthened: the main motivation of man is not pleasure, or even happiness, but the will to find meaning in our lives. He discovered that the meaning he found in his apparently senseless suffering gave him the will to endure it. He quotes Nietzsche several times in the book: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

"Man's search for meaning" sounds like a vague phrase, but Frankl emphasized that
all meaning is specific and situated. He says, "the meaning of life differs from man to
man, from day to day, from hour to hour...to put the question in general terms would be
comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: 'Tell me, master, what is the
best move in the board?'" He sees three ways to find meaning in life: Through a creative
work or task, through an experience or relationship, and finally, in the attitude we take
towards unavoidable suffering. In our lives, we will alternate between finding meaning
in all three.

Frankl seems to use the word "meaning" where other people might use words like "God"
or "love" or "the best course of action given the circumstances." He comes from a
scientific background, but you can't talk about finding meaning in atrocity without
becoming somewhat mystical. It's easy to see the value of suffering when it ends; you
can go back to your normal life more awake, sensitive and compassionate. But what if
it doesn't end, at least not in this life? In Frankl's mind, if the meaning of suffering were
dependent upon such happenstance as whether one escapes or not, that would render
either outcome meaningless. To find meaning in mortality is the ultimate challenge life
gives us, and one we must accept.

As I read, I found it inevitable, as I imagine most readers would, to compare my life
with his. I hope that for most of us, this experience is futile and surreal. The suffering
he endured in concentration camps is so beyond my experience that I can't actually
assimilate it. It makes me feel profoundly grateful, but at the same time, the feeling is
fleeting. Ultimately, I don't think two people's suffering can be compared. But he didn't
write this book for us to make comparisons; he meant for each of us to examine our lives on their own terms.

I sought out this book because I'm trying to find meaning in a life that's very different from the one I imagined myself leading.  Many of the ways I thought I would find meaning in my life aren't currently available to me. I wanted an occupation that would help the community and give me a sense of pride and independence. I wanted daily interactions with my friends, not to mention some kind of love life, and of course, the elemental pleasure of moving my body through the world. I'm terribly sad that I don't have thosethings.

But there are also many things in his categories that I can do. I've always wanted to
write fiction and make art, which I'm doing now because there aren't many other options
or excuses. I still have my family and friends I can keep in touch with thanks to my best
friend the Internet, and those relationships are more important than ever. I can not let
this disease destroy my soul, and I can be damn proud of that. There are times when
all I can do is lie down and feel pain, and my victory over it lies in not throwing the pain
onto those around me.

I was moved to read about what he had to say about the chronically and terminally
ill. While we look to him for inspiration, he found inspiration in people like us. He was
a doctor and no stranger to the failure of the body. He tells the story of a death from
typhus he witnessed in the concentration camp:

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked
to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit
me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual
accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said. "This
tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.". Through the window she could see
just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk
to this tree, she said to me. I was startled and didn't know how to take her words. Was
she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree
replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here--I am
here--I am life, eternal life.'"

I'm not dying, thank God, but I can relate to that story. I was spoiled, too. I also take
great comfort in the view out my window, and I wish that trees would talk to me.

May 12...Happened

So, yesterday was the official International ME/CFS Day.  Whoo!  Hope we're not all too hungover to get back on the computer and reflect on our experiences.  I hadn't done any research for it at all, and I was hoping that I could just go to the biggest CFS advocacy sites, and be part of some well-organized Internet campaign.  I imagined sleek memes to post on Facebook, petitions and email campaigns all ready to go.  I found...very little.  Here's what I did.

I put a blue ribbon on my Facebook profile.  So did 26 other people.  Actually, I just put it on a picture which stayed on my wall because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make it my profile picture.  Then I wrote an update about CFS Awareness Day.  People on Facebook seem more receptive to my posts about webcomics or humorous observations. 

I joined this campaign and wrote letters about CFS to the President and others.  Real paper letters, sent through the mail.  The idea was that they should get there by May 12, but I was sort of late.  It's tempting to make fun of writing to the President (i.e. the heartbreaking naïveté of a patriotic third grader, a great excuse to use the word "quixotic") but it really can't be the least effective thing in the world.  A sizable staff reads every letter and classifies them by issue, and if mine have now become tally marks by "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" that's at least something.  I'm sure they take into account that for every letter, a thousand more apathetic people kind-of feel the same way.

On a more uplifting note, these six awesome people protested outside the ME/CFS meeting of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, demanding government accountability for allowing CFS to go ignored and unfunded for so long.  Thanks, guys.

And thus concludes another successful May 12.

Healing Through Hating: Elaine Showalter

 

 

 

You all know how much I like positivity.  There are so many great things you can do, lying on a couch all day!  I'm not being sarcastic!  Everything I wrote in my last blog entry still stands, about my extreme happiness and gratitude to find that after several months of resting, I can now usually walk from the bed to the fridge without fear of collapse.  But I'll admit, I do get frustrated at times.  I would like to make it beyond the fridge.  And sometimes, in the midst of an attack of frustration, you happen upon something so malicious, ignorant and destructive that you gain an instant arch-nemesis and a way to blow off steam at the same time.  

My new nemesis is Elaine Showalter, a renowned "feminist" scholar and retired professor of Princeton University, who in 1997 published a book called Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media.   I'm afraid you might know where this is going.  Without any medical training and willfully ignoring the vast majority of medical research, as well as the CDC and the experiences of millions of people, she declared Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to be a modern form of mass hysteria, created by the media and gullible, self-centered women eager to find an exogenous cause for their angst.  For a more in-depth and medically footnoted refutation, see Mary Schweitzer's review.  Showalter equated Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and Gulf War Syndrome) with alien abduction, Satanic rituals, and multiple personality disorder.  She then made the talk-show circuit, using her Princeton-backed credentials to argue with patients and doctors, promote herself, and attempt to destroy a patients' rights movement.

Showalter has a lot of power as one of the few well-respected feminist writers in the public eye, and one might think that she would use that power to promote the interests of women.  The first lesson of "Feminism 101" might be concisely summed up as: "Listen to women." Instead, she took the self-described experiences of millions of women, women already ill and struggling to make themselves heard, and silenced them in exactly the same way that the patriarchal medical establishment has always silenced women, by calling them crazy, self-victimizing, and hysterical.  A little bit ironic, maybe, a little? 

CFS affects people of all genders, but the lack of adequate health care and recognition is a feminist issue.  Eighty percent of patients are female, and the other 20% share the marginalization of having a "women's disease." CFS affects more women than AIDS, and despite the "statistics" that Showalter fails to cite, does not discriminate by race, location, or socioeconomic status.  I have to wonder, if men suffered in similar numbers, would CFS still get less research funding than hay fever?  Would millions of men be told that they are hysterical?  Would it even be called "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?"

Another disappointing aspect of the publication of this book is the lack of a widespread critical response.  Most scholars and readers don't seem to question the right of a literary critic to declare diseases imaginary.  I could find only two serious responses, Mary Schweitzer's review and an essay of Peggy Munson's in Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  The vast majority of Internet buzz about Showalter is glowingly, gushingly positive.  Even user-generated content sites like goodreads.com don't seem to question her.  "People are crazy," was the pithy review of a reader who gave the book four stars.  Yes, they are!

Hystories came out a while ago, and thankfully, Elaine Showalter has moved on to topics she knows something about, but she has never retracted or apologized for anything she has written about CFS or Gulf War Syndrome.  The book is still read, and the impact it has on the dialogue surrounding CFS is still relevant.  One of the most tragic aspects of CFS is the skepticism surrounding it.  I have known so many people who, in addition to all the myriad difficulties of living with a debilitating disease, have also been abandoned by family and loved ones who are under the false assumption, propagated by Elaine Showalter and others, that CFS is not a legitimate illness.

It's enough to make an otherwise relatively positive sick girl mad.  It's enough to make her seek catharsis by writing, "Elaine Showalter Kicks Sick Women in the Teeth!" on every sycophantic Internet forum I can find.  It might not be the most adult response, but I'm not a Princeton professor.  And when I finally finish my Great American Zombie Novel based on the CFS epidemic, I'm greatly enjoying imagining a scene in which a character remarkably similar to Elaine Showalter is getting her brains eaten, and a character remarkably similar to me coming up and saying, "Oh, stop being so hysterical."

Progress

Well, here's something you don't hear on these blogs everyday...I have gotten better!  I'm pretty sure I can take it to the present progressive and say I am getting better, but I can definitely look back to three months ago and think, "Yes, I am better now."  This isn't capital-B "Better," the misuse of the word that means "cured."  It's just "better" in it's simple, literal form: not as bad.  And "not as bad" is totally great.

I was waiting to make this historical proclamation until I was sure I was right.  I wouldn't want to let optimism interfere with clear judgement.  The course of this illness is so variable, with so many ups and downs, that even if you log your symptoms every day, it can be hard to find a clear pattern.  Improvement is so incremental that you don't notice it over days, or even weeks, but when you look back over months you can see it.  In February, I could basically make it out to the couch for the day and back to bed at night.  Getting up to go to the bathroom or fridge was something that required serious psyching up for; the pros and cons needed to be seriously weighed.  And now look at me!  Making my own tea, going between the couch and the bed multiple times a day, going to the fridge whenever I want.  I don't mean to brag, but last week I did my own laundry.  And that's in the basement.  Yeah, that's right, down the stairs.

If I gave my energy level in February a 1 out of 10, I'd now give myself about a 2.  It's not a great amount of improvement.  I still can't stand up for more than a few minutes, and I don't feel like I can really leave the house, but improvement is improvement, I'll take it!  There's a big difference between a "1" and a "2," between the ability to get yourself a meal and not.
 
I also did something last week I hadn't done in several months, which is hang out with friends face-to-face.  My good friends from Philly, Zem and Jakey, came to disturb my rural Kansan solitude, and it was awesome.  We lied around inside, we lied around outside, and it was a little exhausting, but with frequent naps I could handle it.  Definitely not something I could have done this winter.

The only thing I can credit for my progress is my body's ability to heal itself when I let it. I spent six years trying to fight this illness by pushing myself beyond my body's new limits, until I pushed myself into a total collapse.  The last few months, I have tried not to push myself at all, and to really let myself rest. I am now a bad-ass of resting.  I have rested through boredom, loneliness, frustration, despair, all the things that used to send me running from how my body really felt, and I have also rested through those rare occasions when I've felt alright, those times I used to try to pack with all the things I was missing out on.  The idea is to have some energy left at the end of the day to reinvest in myself, to spend on fighting this illness.

I know I'm nowhere near healthy, but I am heartened by current trends.  I'm going to keep doing nothing as hard as I can.

The Hope Debate

I made this video a month and a half ago, when I was obsessed by the whole hope vs. acceptance thing.  I came out squarely on the side of hope, and squarely against my tendency to over-intellectualize everything.  From now on, I'm letting cute bears-or-whatever-they-are duke it out for me.  

Cliche Wisdom, David Foster Wallace

I read a good book the other day.  If you have some time and a dictionary and want to lie very still for several weeks and have your mind taken out of your body (anyone?), I very much recommend "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.  It's about a lot of things (it's about...1173 pages long) but part of the book follows former addicts at a halfway house, going to AA meetings and slowly realizing that the tired cliches at the heart of the program, the "One day at a time"s and "Faith in a Higher Power"s insulting their intelligence, are actually the only thing keeping them afloat in a sea of their compulsions and diseases.   

At one point, when Don Gately is in the hospital for heroic injuries, another addict makes him a needlepoint-synthesis of several cliches, which has lately become my personal motto:  "Get well soon, one day at at time, if it's God's will."  I put these words on a dog I found on the Internet to illustrate my point.

 It so happens that I just joined a support group, an online symptom-management class for CFS.  It's less pseudo-religious than AA, but it also employs a lot of cliches that make me want to tear my eyes out.  I have no idea what "Taking control of your illness, so that it doesn't take control of you," means.  But I am finding that following simple advice is comforting, and not very simple when you actually start to do it.  I think about the words on the dog a lot.


Get Better

I can't help it, I am an optimist by nature.  I absolutely believe that I will get better.  There are no amount of discouraging statistics or horrific stories that will dissuade me.  I don't know if I'll get all the way better (for some reason the phrase "get better" is never taken literally), but I do think I will get somewhat better.  I think I can get back to where I was a year ago, the glass overflowing, half-full of health. 

Soon

Well, it probably won't be soon.  This seems to be a lifelong infection, and the stories I hear of recovery and remission all have in common a geologic time scale.  They say that progress isn't apparent day-to-day, or even week-to-week, but over months and years, healing happens.

One Day at a Time

This here is the cliche of cliches, the one true self-opthalectomy-inducing platitude that I used to hate with a blood-spitting passion.  Yes, days occur individually! They follow one another in sequential time!  What bearing does that possible have on me, my sickness and misery?

But actually, this is really important.  When I get overwhelmed with my illness, it usually isn't that I'm sick right now.  It's the imaginary projection of the illness indefinitely into the future.  I imagine being sick forever, and that is the unbearable thing.  I used to think that acceptance, the most basic and important step a sick person can take, meant acceptance of a lifetime of illness.  And I could never do that.  But I don't need to "accept" the future, because I don't know what the future will bring.  I can accept that I'll be sick today, probably tomorrow and on for a while, but worrying about what's going to happen years from now is completely unnecessary.  I can think of things that I am able to do, today, that will make me happy, today, and leave the rest alone.  If the days don't really add up to something greater than themselves, there's nothing wrong with that. 

If It's God's Will

I'm not really into believing in things I can't see.  I'm not going back to acupuncture school because of the lack of evidence that it actually works.  See two posts ago for my opinion on the spiritual principles of hippie doctors (it's low).  But nonetheless, there are things I believe in for no rational reason, simply because I feel that they're true.  I believe in them because I believe in them, okay?  It's the second rule of tautology club.

When I got sick this time around, real sick, I did my share of fist-shaking and God-cursing.  But really, you can only do so much of that before you start feeling ridiculous.  There's no shortage of pain in the world; "Why, God, why?" has no answer.  I tried my best to dispense with the self-pity.  And I found that, even though the amount of horror and suffering in the world is in no way rationally reconcilable with any idea of a benevolent "God," I still feel guided, and supported, and graced.  So I don't choose to believe, but just sort of happen to believe, that there is a divine logic at work that I can't understand, "Karma" or "God's will" or whatever.

To me, this means that even though shitty things are happening, they aren't necessarily things going wrong.  Who am I to know what's ultimately best for me?  Even if I'm not being "productive" in the outside world, I'm doing what I can to face this illness with as much dignity and equanimity as possible; maybe that's what my life's supposed to be about right now.  And even if chaos and entropy rule the universe, why react differently?  Why not, you know, try to be happy with what you have? So even though I particularly hate the phrase tossed around in certain circles, "Bloom where you're planted," and wish I would never again see those words in that particular combination, I must admit it makes a certain amount of self-evident sense.  And like following the advice of most of these cliches, what choice do you actually have?

A measured and Calmly-Worded Letter to my Doctor

This is a letter I wrote and actually sent to my doctor.  I felt pretty good about it.  I'm putting it on my blog.

Dear Ms. Doctor,

I doubt you'll remember me.  I came into your office sometime in January about tendinitis in my wrist, and I've been thinking about the interaction we had ever since.  I hope you take this letter in the spirit in which it is written, which isn't out of anger or hostility at all, but a sincere desire for better understanding. 

The day I saw you, I wrote on my medical history intake form, under the question about ongoing illnesses, "I've had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for six years."  You read my form, and then looked at me and said, "So you seem really healthy."  I was shocked, and I didn't know what to say.  I had only come to see you about my wrist and didn't feel like making a speech, so I just said, "Yeah..."   It was an expedient lie that I wish I hadn't made.

The truth is, I'm one of millions of people in this country who have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  Despite its pejorative name, this is a very serious illness.  The first five years or so, I was actually wildly healthy for a person with CFS; I was about 50% functional, able to work part-time and have an active social life.  I spent the other half my time in bed feeling like I had a terrible flu.  Then my condition deteriorated, partly because I pushed myself too hard (moving, grad school), and for the past several months I have been almost completely bedridden.  I am able to rally every so often, like when I came to see you about my wrist, but then I pay for it later.  

The purpose of this letter isn't to blame you or to complain, it's to raise awareness about CFS.  CFS is twice as common as multiple sclerosis, and more common in women than HIV.  The etiology is unknown, but most scientists believe it is caused by a virus, possibly the retrovirus XMRV, but this research is still fairly new.  Researchers at the University of Miami and the Medical and Dental University of New Jersey have both found biomarkers for CFS in recent years.  Even so, most doctors aren't educated about it, or even more insidiously, believe that it is a psychological condition.  I assure you it is not!  For more information about CFS (also known as Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis) you can go to the CFIDS Association of America's website, http://www.cfids.org/ . This is a great review of the state of CFS research, statistics, and professional resources.  

Over the last few months, I kept thinking of how I didn't respond to your statement with the sad and uncomfortable truth, and the effect that will have on your next CFS patient.  There isn't a lot I can do about my condition, but raising awareness and promoting correct information is the first step towards a cure.  Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and think about CFS. 

Sincerely,

Lee Davis