Throughout the autumn and winter of my final year as an undergraduate, I began to spend more of my time with pain than without it. In those gradually shortening days, I was flung from appointment to appointment, barely able to manage the twenty minute walks to each of them. Now it is difficult for me to remember these months as anything but my body; a situation likes this makes a mockery of the space we try to keep between our body and mind. In these months, poetry was not written - and that might surprise you.
It isn’t unnatural to associate writing and pain, and ill writers are not alone. ‘We wordsmiths’, admits Ann Morgan, ‘are a sickly bunch’. If you ask someone to name three writers, I can guarantee that at least one of them will have produced their works through a condition. Charlotte Brontë suffered intense headaches; Thomas De Quincey had neuralgia; and Proust’s severe asthma almost killed him on occasion. Yet many of these writers, for various reasons, did not write publicly about the daily battleground that was their own bodies.
In one of my favourite of her essays, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf notices this:
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings … it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature”
Her essay was published in January 1926. Since then, the birth of confessional poetry has come to pass; Lowell, Snodgrass, Sexton, Plath and Berryman granted us vital permission to engage with the day-to-day annoyances, revelations and torments of pain. The reality of being a writer in pain is even acknowledged in the bureaucracy of publication forms. I would argue that we have entered an age where many think that being a sick writer has its upsides.
It’s true that illness can lead to insight. Chronic pain, in particular, forces a person into long periods of stillness and observation - albeit not ‘passive’ ones. When in suitably drugged and in bed, I do nothing but experience the given moment my body is in, and any decision has to be made with it in mind. My head often sounded like:
Is walking across the room to put my radio on going to be okay?
Have I asked my partner to run errands too often?
Will these painkillers work enough for me to see this friend, or will I have to let them down?
But it’s only when I am very lucky that I’m able to think about it.
The truth is that I can barely drag myself to pick up a pen when in pain. My writing efforts have become as unpredictable as my own body. When daily tasks are insurmountable, writing is a luxury I cannot afford.
My academic work tanked - I think I handed in one or two essays out of eight - but I found something funny in the fact it happened to be the ‘tragedy’ term in my English course. Naturally, I exploited this coincidence. I intellectualised it. I think this is a very natural response to pain - to joke about it, to control it in any way you can so that your body doesn’t become owned by it.
In my work on tragedy, I focused on physical pain: Hippolytus’ entanglement in his horses and chariot; the poisoned shirt of Nessus that made a funeral pyre Heracles’ only escape; the limbs that litter the text of Titus Andronicus. Through it, I came across a famous excerpt from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain:
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it”
I had been confronting this truth every day. Whenever I rang NHS 111 or went to a doctor, they would always ask me to rate my pain out of ten. Most of the time I said eight, whatever that means. They tossed around opposites like ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, ‘sharp’ or ‘dull’, but nothing could ever directly make my experience clear.
One doctor, closely watched by a student, pressed my lower abdomen, asking ‘is this tender?’. I could only say ‘yes’, hoping that whatever he meant by that allowed my pain to take shape. I often had physical symptoms which helped alleviate medical doubt, but nothing ever felt enough. Even now, nothing can ever hit the nail on the head.
For a writer, this is nothing short of devastating. Whenever I have tried to write about this, I have met defeat. Similes stop short, metaphors are overshadowed. I can’t help but state only facts, and have never felt so at the mercy of my reader’s own empathy and experience. I began to think: Who am I, if I’m not able to describe the thing I am experiencing? Pain doesn’t just interrupt my writing, it teaches me what words cannot hold.
In these moments, I turned to art. My lifelong admiration of Frida Kahlo shifted with my own experience as I studied her surrealist self-portraits—many of which visualise her lifelong pain and disability. The Broken Column (1944) lingers in my mind, depicting her upper body as a ravine, split open to reveal her spine: a shattered Roman column. I also sought out contemporary artists who explore pain, attending Tracey Emin’s I followed you to the end exhibition in London, where the bed installation felt at once intimate and tragic, the body both vulnerable and sexualised.
I also wanted to read what others had managed to write about their own pain, how they had held it. I started reading Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and although our experiences are vastly different, it became clear to me that stating the facts of pain are more powerful than I ever realised. She writes not about what pain ‘feels like,’ but about what it does — to her body, to her days. Her concerns are laid bare.
“I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilise into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined”
This writing, stronger than pain, made me ask myself a new question: What are you afraid of?
At no point does she agonise over the sensation of her pain, and I realise something. Nobody will ever truly know my own body and its various states. The goal of writing pain, or even the body, is not metaphorical ‘accuracy’. We can call it an arrow, a fire, or a rope, and never feel vindicated. Pain has taken away my fluency, but Lorde reminds me that silence is not refuge. To write, even falteringly, is to resist disappearing into that silence.
Like many, I have been left without answers by medical professionals. Their notes are thin, their scales reductive. I can’t bear for those fragments — scales, opposites — to be the only record of my pain.
References in order (linked in the text):
Ann Morgan, ‘Writing and Sickness’ (2018)
Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’ (1926)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)
Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column (1946)
Tracey Emin, I followed you to the end (2024)
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980)
Further Reading
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)
Lucy Grealy, The Autobiography of a Face (1994)
Deborah Padfield, Brian Hurwitz, Charles Pither, Perceptions of Pain (2003)
Miranda Hart, I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You (2024)
Photo credits:
Alina Grubnyak (2018), from Unsplash