#22: amber, archers, cinnamon

Plus therapy-speak, You Hurt My Feelings, introducing GriefSick

Sep 17, 2023

You’re reading This Might Resonate, a monthly newsletter from me, Emily. Welcome to all 785 of you! A favour: if you enjoy This Might Resonate, please forward it to a friend - they can subscribe right here.

A bunch of flowers on a kitchen counter, they are mostly red and lilac — GriefSick launch day flowers (see below), in the brand colours, courtesy of lovely friends

Reading and listening

The morning ritual of Sonoko Sakai, a Los Angeles-based cook, teacher and writer. Beautiful photos.

What Can Ancient Spiritual Poetry Teach Us about Living? “In 1989 I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in Tehran; my first two languages were Farsi and English, in that order. My first full sentence was “Gimmee ob,” ob being the Farsi word for water. I have always been a bit thirsty”.

‘That’s triggering!’ Is therapy-speak changing the way we talk about ourselves? In my view, yes, and this can be positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the context. Shared language for phenomena can be enormously helpful in building understanding and connection. It can also flatten and obfuscate, depending on the context.

On Killing Charles Dickens (I cannot wait to read The Fraud).

Active Hope (getting clear on what we hope for and taking action to move that way).

Watching

Polite Society, extremely fun, ass-kickings all-round.

Starstruck Season 3, a satisfying conclusion.

You Hurt My Feelings. Writers (preferably in New York) agonising over creativity and life’s small injustices remains one of my favourite genres of art. See also most of Nora Ephron’s output.

Writing

The past 10 days have been exciting and emotional; I launched GriefSick, a newsletter that explores and bears witness to chronic illness grief, a painful and common experience that lacks infrastructure, language, awareness and a place in culture.

I’ve received so many beautiful responses from chronically ill people about what this work means to them. Read Edition #1 to learn more about why I believe talking about chronic illness grief is important (and why I chose the name “GriefSick”).

There are two ways that chronic illness can disappear your life. Slowly, and then suddenly. For me, it began slowly in 2015. Due to the disabling effects of ME/CFS, I experienced the gradual narrowing of life over the course of two years. Turning down the odd social event, avoiding errands that involved walking up the hill, looking for ways to reduce the demands of work. I was not prepared for the subsequent sudden disappearing. In the year 2018, over eight months, I lost a romantic relationship of seven years, several other close relationships, my abilities to work, socialise and exercise, my trust in my body, my imagined future and my sense of self. Some of these losses I regained, but in a significantly different version than my previous life.

I’ve been working on this idea for over two years, shaping it slowly through conversations, reading (see Edition #2), resting and dreaming, and working around my energy constraints. But, honestly, I think I’ve been working on it unconsciously for the eight years I’ve been sick.

Big thanks to Notes on Navigating for their deep expertise and compassionate space holding as I navigated the early stages of this work. Also to Laura Malan and Fran Cook who designed the beautiful brand and helped me dream into this idea. And the many others who have supported me.

I suspect that GriefSick is not for everyone, all of the time. There have been points in the past eight years of my illness where I could not have engaged with GriefSIck. Maybe that’s where you are now, and if so, I encourage you to protect yourself by not subscribing 💜.

A note: I will continue to publish This Might Resonate alongside GriefSick. TMR’s focus will always be the more unusual corners of culture.

Still savouring…

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. — Source

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