This is a collection of a few blogs I have previously written about illness. I'm re-posting it now for a colorful friend...April 6, 2007, I received a letter, a letter I had been waiting for, impatiently, for more than two months. The letter announced a great success for me, an impending Season of Triumph. I read and re-read the letter on a sunny Friday afternoon. I took a walk around my neighborhood, my fist raised high in the air, in triumph. Walking through the bright, sun drenched streets, I felt enlivened and validated.
A few nights later, after eating a bite at a
café, and upon stepping outside to hail a taxi, I fell into a stupor, whereupon a few white lanterns festooned below a red awning across the street appeared to me as the sole constellation of stars in a universe from which I was slowly receding, as it were, into a hole, as black as pitch.
My wife helped me into the taxi. She helped me home to bed. That night, I woke up drenched in my own sweat. The next morning when I awoke I was unimaginably thirsty, as if a high powered vacuum were sucking the water out of my organs, indeed the very pulp from my bones.
Suddenly, surely, it seemed to me, I was suffering a re-lapse of an old
illness, an illness I had assumed I had "cured" several years ago.
The fantasy of my impending Season of Triumph seemingly sidetracked, I looked at myself and I judged my life cruel and unfair.
So I called a
doctor in India and ordered a two month supply of
ayurvedic herbs—the wonderful herbs that had healed me before; the wonderful herbs that had left me symptom free for almost three years. And I waited, impatiently, for the herbs to come in the mail. Meanwhile I moseyed around my apartment with the dour expression of a mope.

How could I have so easily let go of my impending Season of Triumph? To me, it seems obvious: I was immersed in my own unhappiness; depression had laid a thin veil over my senses. I had lost my sense of fantasy.
Is it possible to lose one's sense of fantasy? Yes, of course. But here I'll make a distinction between two types of fantasy: the fantasy of the soul and the fantasy of the body. Hit with illness, in the midst of my triumph, I had somehow lost my sense of soul fantasy and suddenly, powerfully, I was intoxicated by my body fantasy.
What is the difference? Soul fantasy imagines. Body fantasy identifies. Quite simply, my capacity to imagine a season of triumph had been replaced by my identification with material reality (my illness). Stuck in this identification, like a fly in glue, I envisioned no triumph, only illness and more illness stretching out towards the summer.
I was lying on the couch. feeling tired, ill, apathetic. I mulled my symptoms in my head—fatigue, sleeplessness, moving pain—and the more I thought about the symptoms, the more they seemed to change, or more precisely, evolve. I was immersed in fantasy, and yet, suffering confusion: I did not experience this fantasy as fantasy; in fact, I believed I had abandoned fantasy in favor of reality.
But I had not abandoned fantasy!
After all, I had already made up plenty of fantasies to satisfy the simple question, "What is wrong with me?" The organic sickness may seem obvious, but the fantasy of illness, the sense of wrongness, is what really plagued me.
We all suffer the weight of living within our bodies; our suffering is similar. Modern medicine assumes this very fact: while we all suffer in unique ways, the nature of our bodily suffering can be
catalogued and explained with reference to the suffering of other bodies.
And so we tend to believe the fantasy of illness is eclipsed by the reality of illness. After all, the pain in the body is a stark reality, a truth that cannot be ignored. And so we deal with it, in a manner that seems fitting: perhaps we flop on the couch; perhaps we raise our fist in the air, in triumph, and decide to beat the illness to a pulp.
Still, whether we bear our illness like a hero, deserve it like a martyr, or run away from it like a coward, we are still fantasizing, attempting in any way we can to deal with the unknown. And we differ, immensely, in the manner we deal with the unknown. Yes, we all share the weight of living within our bodies, but we are astonishingly unique in the fantasies we devise in order to live, happily or unhappily, with this weight.
I am writing here in favor of fantasy. I do not buy the ridiculous notion that fantasy takes us away from "what is." To me, fantasy is deepening pursuit, where every experience, every moment, becomes an opportunity for soul-making. When I fantasize about my triumph I am fruitfully making; when I fantasize about doom I, too, am fruitfully making.
Yes, fantasy, or imagination if you prefer, takes us away from our material reality. But it leads us, step by step, to an altogether different reality, a reality of our own making. Through imagination, I see through the seemingly cruel fact of my illness; I give it meaning, when before, mired in reality, it had none.
"There is a joy in this," James
Hillman writes, "For as the soul becomes a vivified reality of its own, an image-finder and image-maker, life becomes relieved of having to be a vast defensive engagement against…reality."
***
I will let you into a bit of my fantasizing, as I had wrote it in my journal around that time:
"I had intended on working on my novel the entire morning, but now I am paralyzed with a pervasive fear that seems to be gripping my shoulders and literally pushing me down into the floor. It's saying: 'Give up, fall asleep, be fearful, be very, very fearful…'
Fear: it is the hardest part of any illness—the illness itself, and the recovery, for recovery always leaves the possibility of relapse. What can I do? Endure? Live? I have no choice but to acquiesce to life. I have no choice but to continue to live.
What am I afraid of? My fear is not the fear of death. My fear is life! The mere idea that I am alive is enough to throw me into hysterics. I want to run out onto the street and scream at the top of my lungs: 'I'm alive!'
And yet, at the same time I want to flop down on the sofa, close my eyes, and keep them closed until my fear subsides.
Will it ever subside? I cannot say.
My illness has forced me to mature and now my recovery is doing the same thing. Recovery. Perhaps we are all recovering, everyday, and death is just the final reward for a lifetime of recovery. What are we recovering from? Birth. What a drastic trauma! What a ridiculous circumstance! I mean we come here naked, we spend our lives in clothes, and the whole time we have the vague feeling that what we have always thought is appropriate is not really appropriate at all. In fact, perhaps the most appropriate thing to do is strip naked, down to our bones, and walk the streets in utter triumph. I can just picture it: thousands of people crowding the avenues, everyone naked—enormously naked. We will pump our fists in the air as if it were a protest, a protest against fear.
We will not cower in the face of our troubles. We will triumph.
Yes, the cries will fill the afternoon air! We will overcome!
The choice is simple. Do you stand in place? Or, do you take one step forward? That first step—it must be like sitting down to write, each morning.
The first step—and then one must take another, and another, until one is walking. And then when we become bored of walking, we jog; we jog, until we become bored of jogging, but by then we have reached the coast and all we can see for miles around is the beautiful white sand. No longer jogging, we sprint. And then we fly over the sand—yes,
fly. We are rising from the ground, floating into space. And that explosion we see in the night sky is our head bursting over the firmament. How
beautiful it must feel, to spread ourselves out over the sky, to liquidate.
But really, perhaps I am only a thin man, dreaming of implosion. And the scene I see over the firmament is not my head bursting, but the wide expanse of a black hole sucking everything down and spitting it back out.
It's obvious: I want to go somewhere and come back changed. I want to take my herbs and suddenly become irrevocably new. And there's my impending Season of Triumph, always about to begin.
The illness I suffer from is not called dying, but living."
***
I can't read this without feeling somewhat embarrassed, even alarmed. The person who wrote that seems like a fanatic to me, a true madmen. Of course, I was a fanatic, a madman. This is what illness can do to you: throw you into a new, crazed realm. That is why the experience can be so disastrous; it's also why, it can be so enlightening.
Illness, I think, can help you grow into a new person. But you have to fight it. Illness and recovery are fundamental components of the human experience. We all experience illness and recovery. But can we use the occasion of illness to truly recover? Recovery is often more about what is not apparent then what is: the obvious physical illness may be shielding the less obvious psychological issues—issues that simply need to be dealt with, in order to heal, to be fully alive and healthy.
I believe illness can offer transformation, but only if the experience of being ill is fully lived. Too often we take drugs that suppress our symptoms and so we never actually live the symptoms, letting them teach us what we need to learn.
We tend to think that illness is an unnatural state from which we must escape. We are meant to be well, to be happy. I know I tend to think this way. I absolutely do not want to feel unwell. I absolutely want to be happy. But life is not entirely about being well and happy. Life is also about struggle. In my darkest moments it is not the idea of happiness that gives me strength, but this notion of struggle.
Yes, life can be excruciating, but I have the suspicion that life is supposed to be this way, that we are supposed to live under all kinds of moons; to suffer loneliness and relish it; to laugh because if we do not laugh we will cry; to clutch our stomachs in pain; to hurt ourselves as we hurt others (only worse); to eat the last bite and drink more then enough wine and still not be satisfied; to be hungry and hollow one moment and satiated and disgusted the next; to want to die, just a bit, every day; but to want to live a bit more, because life is not intended to dull us into submission, but to continually alert us, again and again, that life is living when it is felt deeply.
I always feel slightly ridiculous when I recover from an illness. I think about the time I wasted being ill, the time I wasted worrying, and the crushing symptoms that no longer seem real. Still, I notice: I am deeply impacted by the experience of illness—illness has changed me. And when I recover I notice: I am a bit more humble, a bit more in love.
Isn't this the value of illness? The experience of being ill scores our identity. And yet, as we try to walk away from it, a bit dazed, we take new steps towards new possibilities.