Alice Hattrick - Ill Feelings: Stories of Unexplained Illness

ILL FEELINGS

Alice Hattricks criticism and interviews have appeared in publications such as frieze magazine, ArtReview , and The White Review . Alices work has most recently been included in Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH (ed. Brbara Rodrguez Muoz, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, a resource for disabled and/or chronically ill artists, curators, and writers, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose. In 2016, they were shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Ill Feelings is their first book.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Published by Scribe 2021
Originally published in Great Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021

Copyright Alice Hattrick 2021

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Scribe acknowledges Australias First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 922310 14 9 (paperback edition)
978 1 922586 14 8 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

How well one has to be to be ill!

Alice Jamess Diary

Dredge

The day after her fifty-fourth birthday, my mother and I walk through a field near her house at dusk, a small pair of scissors tied to a long string around her neck. The dogs are on their leads because its getting dark and she isnt brave enough to let them off because of the rabbits. She has already been signed off sick for a year and three months. As we walk, my mother starts to sing the folk song, She moved through the fair.

My love said to me

My mother wont mind

And my father wont slight you

For your lack of kind

My mother mostly sings songs she learnt at musical theatre college, or Norwegian songs from choir, but this one is different it belongs to her. The lyrics, and the tune, make her voice melancholic, and more relaxed.

And she smiled as she passed me

With her goods and her gear

And that was the last

That I saw of my dear.

We walk quite far that evening, further than I expect. My mother wants to walk further still, but she is worried about walking back, about me walking back. She is used to negotiating the length of these walks in her own mind, depending on how she is feeling in her body, and the things she still needs to do that day, or even the next day, like go and see her father at the care home, or finish filling out another form relating to her Ill Health Retirement. It is a careful calculation that, once decided upon, can and most probably will be ruefully ignored she just has to face the consequences.

My mother has moved to mid-Norfolk, where the River Nar crosses the Peddars Way, to be near my grandfather, who has vascular dementia and Alzheimers. He is convinced she lives in Burnham Market, a posh town near the North Norfolk coast, where no one in our family has ever lived, and none of us could ever afford. My mother will move away from here just as quickly, once he has died of leukaemia. The village she has moved to is an ancient land of crossings. When she first arrived, a woman told her she would be healed by the power of the place itself.

My mother had to reschedule her last meeting with HR because it was at 9 am on a Wednesday.

I was in bed all morning, she says, as if they should know that someone who is about to be signed off sick forever will never make it to a meeting first thing. Its like the time she was annoyed at the ME/CFS service, who kept calling her when she was asleep, without warning.

What she means is: I am in bed all morning every day.

Dear Dr, reads a document on her desktop back at her house, I have muscle weakness in my hands (holding a pen, lifting a kettle) and legs and breathlessness and palpitations on activity are problematic. Processing and translating information is very difficult and slow, which makes research, publication and teaching impossible.

Ive had enough of my shit, she says to me, on our walk. Im wasted.

When my mother says shes wasted, does she mean she feels wasted ill, fatigued, sick or does she also mean her working life is wasted, her potential is spent ?

A long time ago, my mother sought a diagnosis. Upon relapsing into full-blown illness again, unable to go to her job as a lecturer in History of Design, she has found only more work : phone calls and confusing meetings with HR, days spent compiling documents with names like Letter to Sussex Wide ME service.doc and Ill Health Retirement Factsheet.pdf. My mother must write her own medical history, over and over again, like a doctor, except she is also the patient.

ME also causes severe impairment of my cognitive functioning including extreme difficulty in focusing and concentrating for any length of time on a task, conversation or text, she writes. She suffers with impaired and interrupted sleep and extreme irritability and mood swings, wakes extremely fatigued, has ear pain, breathing difficulties, frontal headache, sore throat, nausea, heart palpitations, unrefreshing sleep, and even orthostatic intolerance, anxiety and of course extreme fatigue. She cannot function, has trouble processing and translating information, including knowledge of her subject and events in the past. She must describe her ill feelings not being able to stand for very long, feeling sick, feeling tired and sore as if her body is not a body at all, as if her body is a machine malfunctioning, like she is faulty, or broken. If she were a computer she would have crashed .

If illness is the great confessional, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay On Being Ill, why is my mother writing like this? Where are the things said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals? There is the impossibility of speaking through pain, which Woolf also wrote about let a sufferer describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry but that is not exactly true. It is as if my mother is writing against the possibilities of a literature of illness entirely.

My mother does not speak to me in the way she writes in her Details of Illness. She speaks like Woolf in June 1919, writing a letter to her sister Vanessa: Did anyone ever suffer as I did? You might have seen my soul shrivelling like a I cannot remember the image exactly, but it is something one does by rubbing a piece of sealing wax and then everything else curls up as if in agony.

When I am touched, I feel like those fish that twist up in the heat of your hand.

Fuck all this fucking paperwork, she says. Im wasted.

Audre Lorde wrote The Cancer Journals so that, in her words, the pain not be wasted.

Is feeling wasted the same as feeling worthless? I do not need to ask her. Im not her therapist. I am her daughter, her biographer, and I know how she feels. I have always been like her, and, for most of my life, she has felt ill.

With the onset of illness, there is a before and after instead of a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is before you got sick, and then there is after your life forever changed. My mother has a small black-and-white photograph of herself, taken when she started her BA, a copy of which would have been pinned to the notice board during her undergraduate course at the university where she would eventually teach students about archives, material culture and queer histories: her before. On the back, she has written: Taken in 1994. I am 29. Pre-ME JUST. She has short hair and is wearing a white wide-collared shirt and a dark coloured waistcoat. She is young: thirty-one, not twenty-nine, unless she got the year wrong. Either way, she is younger than me, except she has two young children, a girl and a boy. She is on her own, when it comes to childrearing and homemaking at least. She isnt ill, yet.