Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📚 Read “The Invisible Kingdom” Shines a Light on Women’s Chronic Pain.

Another great interview with Meghan O’Rourke. Here are some quotes that stood out for me this time:

I used to say to one of my doctors that I didn’t care that I was in pain. The thing that undid me was the brain fog and the fatigue, because they subsumed my entire being. They washed away any effort of will that I might have. And so they made it impossible for me to write.

This is so true for me. I can tolerate a lot of physical pain. I didn’t know how much until with health coaching, hard work, and a good doctor I started to feel better. But I couldn’t, still can’t, push through fatigue and brain fog.

[With invisible illness] there’s no one coming to your bedside, there’s no meal chain organized.

I didn’t think about this just now but I have absolutely seen this play out with my mom. She’s been dealing with autoimmune disease for about 30 years. I don’t think she or my dad felt it was reasonable to ask for help with that, and so often when anyone in our family has talked about it, we’ve been met with advice about going gluten-free, doing acupuncture, meditating… These are all good and valuable things, but the contrast with the outpouring of questions about how people could help after her leukemia diagnosis is striking. Instead of “Oh you should try this” it’s “What can I do for you?” I suspect there were days when my mom was at her worst with Hashimoto’s that she was as low energy and could use as much help as she needs now.

🔖📚 Read Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke.

O’Rourke’s making the rounds to promote her new book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness which I want to read so much. (I’ve got it on hold from the library.)

There are a couple of key quotes from the interview I want to share:

when I was at my sickest, I couldn’t write anything much longer than a sentence. Not a paragraph, and definitely not a chapter.

On my worst days, I feel this way. The difference between days when my brain is zipping along in clarity and wheh it’s slogging through fog is hard to communicate. It is vast.

I was talking about this with a student the other day, and she made a great point. Writers are always being told that you need to be at your desk every day, that you have to push through. And for writers like herself — she has several chronic illnesses — that’s just not feasible. It’s an unreasonable expectation, and an unhealthy one.

Yes! I sometimes scold myself for not writing every day but this is important to remember. It’s also important to capitalize on the good days when we have them.

I wanted the book to be readable for people like me. When you suffer from brain fog, it’s tough to sustain your attention for so long. That’s also why I wanted the chapters to be relatively short and digestible.

This is awesome. I turn to essays when my brain is foggy but I want to read. I’m going to think more about what accessible literature means with respect to cognitive capacity.