Notes on my recent piece of Basil.
In this piece I wanted to explore my relationship to illness.
I’m lucky to be pretty healthy and I know that. I have chronic pain, but it’s not caused by a disease.
But I tend to have weird feelings about being sick. Not that I feel weird, but that the feelings themselves are weird.
When I get or a cold or something I don’t really mind much. Sure it’s uncomfortable, disruptive, and downright misery when it’s the flu or something more serious. But at the same time it often comes as….a relief. A break from everything. When you’re sick your only job is to get better. It’s okay to rest.
I’ve been working part time for about two years now. Prior to that I only worked seasonally, so my feelings about work were contained with the knowledge that “this will be over soon”. But now that I have a car payment (my mom didn’t MEAN to drive my car into a pothole…but we are where we are…)
I’m 30 and realizing I won’t ever be retuned to that blissful unemployed lifestyle I used to have. It’s not like it was a cake walk— I was morbidly depressed, isolated. But now I’m depressed and I stand behind a register. My free time feels so precious now that I panic and overthink about how to spend it.
So, a few months back I got the flu. I hadn’t gotten it in YEARS, I usually get my shot pretty regularly but it’s not foolproof.
I can remember running a high fever and laying under every damn blanket I owned, just focusing on trying to breathe as I lay in the dark.
It was a wondrous feeling, really. All of my worries about what I could or should be doing were taken mercifully out of my hands by the illness. I was unable to do anything but lie there, I was so sick. But I’d never felt more free.
I don’t know what it says about me that that’s what it took to strip away every artifice of worry masquerading as self-awareness.
When you’re a kid it’s easier. Being sick just sucks because it interrupts your normal “job” or being a kid and growing up.
Yet now, it places me back in that feeling of freedom…
Of course as an adult living at home, sickness has that luxury of being a “break” to me. I have people I can rely on. But this will not always be so, and is in fact not so for many people.
So this is for everyone who needs to feel taken care of, whether you’re sick of body or soul. We all deserve to feel taken care of like a kid sometimes.
Basil is safe and so are we.
