The Talking Cure: Disability

Back in 2020 I published this article on what it is like to live with a disabled brother. It is strange reading it again three years later and stranger still to realise how much perspective one gains in a relatively short space of time. To an extent there's a sad naivety in the tone of voice, an over-use of the word 'really' which hyperbolically yells 'this-is-an-over-compensation-that-isn't-quite-telling-the-truth-but-which-is-trying-really-hard-to-find-expression-for-something-inexpressible'. On reflection the piece was entirely outward looking, maybe because going inwards was too painful.

Perhaps the wound couldn't quite find the words at that point in time, or maybe the wound wasn't fully realised. Let's face it, you can't find language for a feeling you don't yet know you feel. This frustrates me because I’m of the mindset that growing older means that you heal the wounds that you hold - or perhaps it’s better to say you heal the wounds which hold you - through the process of maturity. A failure to do so would therefore necessarily imply an immaturity. Maybe it’s too much to expect of myself, to believe I should have reconciled the reality of my brother by now and found peace with it. In fact, the reverse has occurred; it bothers me now more than ever and it festers and permeates and surfaces with an aggressive hopelessness. That’s a far cry from my former piece that was endearingly imbued with kindness, hopefulness and love.

Notice the pronoun: ‘it’. Not ‘him’ but ‘it’ bothers me. So, what is ‘it’? Well, let’s start by what ‘it’ is not. ‘It’ is not my former piece of writing that annoys me nor my brother in and of himself (though he can be a right little shit when he wants to be). I think maybe ‘it’ is a feeling of lurking unfairness, merged together with the fear that such unfairness cannot be resolved but only reckoned with. Then follows the subsequent guilt of feeling that I should not feel it to be unfair in the first place. A Gaudian knot or a clusterfuck, so to speak! ‘It’ is a fear of non-control, of feeling so strongly that words can’t capture such a specificity or ferociousness of feeling. Then comes the fear that writing - the one thing that has been a constant for me – cannot serve me in expressing the thing that so fundamentally defines me. I suppose then, what my former piece misses is the reality of dread that comes with having a disabled sibling.

So, now perhaps it’s time for a complimentary piece that is also an antithesis – the piece about peace or a lack of it. A peaceless piece, if you’re feeling playful…

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In any literature that I read I am interested as much in what is left unsaid as I am in interested in what is said. There is huge loudness in what gets omitted from writing – the noise of the silence that lies in the white space between the ink - and my god, does the absence of certain truths in my former piece scream out to me when read through the eyes of an older self. So, the question really is, how to find a language that is appropriate and powerful enough to say the unsayable and the difficult.

There was one professor at my university who taught a course on the relationship between mental health, women’s writing and language. I was probably a bit in love with her because she was brilliant and she taught brilliant books with a level of acute sensitivity and passion I’d never seen before. She would ask me questions like ‘why bother reading and writing difficult texts’ and ‘is there reality beyond language?’, knowing of course that such questions were twatty enough to wind me up but provocative enough to make me think. Outrage and deep thought tend to produce great writing - or result in homicide - so I’m glad she teased out the former rather than the latter.

When reading my dissertation on the ethics of ‘difficult’ poetry and the healing power of literary indecipherability, she asked me ‘do you think you like difficult poets because you grapple with difficulty?’ Obviously at this point I am frothing at the mouth… how outrageously, scrumptiously and shamelessly twatty of her, but also how bold, terrifying and kind of her to have read me so well.

She saw beneath the surface - that counts, that matters, that's beautiful. On the surface, my life has not been difficult. The facticity of it spells out an easy life -– middleclass upbringing, general comfort, superb parents, superb friends, no physical injuries, a great education, a profound love for the world and people - but my inner life, defined here as the subjective, unseeable life within the mind has been difficult. A disabled child is a difficult fact. A disabled sibling is a difficult fact. Harry is a difficult fact. The subjective mental processing of that fact is therefore very difficult. Objectively, it’s difficult and subjectively, for someone who feels everything at 100 million degrees, it’s VERY difficult. My professor’s question provoked a reaction in me that was so visceral that my eyes welled up, not because she had upset me but because she had half-identified a cure for me, namely the power of ‘the talking wound’.

Reading critically labelled ‘difficult’ prose and poetry that drives people mad because they can’t make sense of it, has been curative for me because it allows me to sit with things that other people can’t sit with. I make sense of ‘difficult’ texts not by cracking them, but by finding a way of imaginatively configuring them to make sense. It takes effort, yes, but it ironically takes no effort at all – the pure enjoyment of not knowing at first how to approach something or not immediately understanding how it can be resolved. A lot of people don’t realise that half of the production of meaning that comes out of writing lies with the person who reads what has been written. It’s a dialogism, a dialogue, an exchange, a mutual effort. That’s kind of beautiful, right?

My mistake then, has been attempting to solve the difficult fact that is ‘Harry’. It can’t be solved, but rather has to be sat with, brewed upon and then dealt with through ‘saying’ and through writing: the talking cure for the talking wound. I cannot emphasise how much of a painful process it is to bring to the surface of language, some of the things I have felt about Harry because as the saying goes ‘some things are better left unsaid.’ Not this. This needs to find expression before it festers and destroys. Writing, as an imaginative act, provides the creative antithesis to the destructive reality, and so you have it: momentary peace through permanence of ink.

Like many of John Ashbery’s poems, expressing the difficulty of ‘Harry’ requires delicate ambivalence: he is beautiful in some respects but awful in others. I love him and honestly, sometimes resent him, then I resent that I resent him. I think this is why literature is so fabulous because good writers understand complexity and irreconcilability without seeking to find synthesis. So maybe Harry is an Ashbery poem – something to be sat with lovingly, whilst recognising the grief he can cause from time to time. Writing about how it feels to sit with that grief and that hopeless incapacity to find a synthesised ‘solution’ is a way of making what is ‘hopeless’ into something actionable, writeable and therefore, beautiful.