HERE’S WHAT I know about illness: it’ll splinter a world. Unhinge your sense of identity, crack open the architecture of the life you spent years building. You will lose jobs, homes, relationships, your sense of self.
Everything, and I mean everything, will come crashing down for each Friday night that you spend on the kitchen floor weeping, waiting for yet another ambulance. And most people will never witness you at the edges of what you can hold.
Most people will only see you on good days, when you can walk unaided and move through the world looking like an able-bodied person. That’s perhaps the cruellest thing about an invisible illness; the rest of the world rarely knows when it’s taking everything in you to simply exist.
Here’s what I know about poverty: it’s with you from the very beginning, it determines your access to education, resources, health care, jobs, food. It’s visible in your accent, until it’s not.
Until you learn to speak a different way to be accepted. It’s in how you dress, until it’s not.
Until you internalise classist beliefs about what common looks like. It’s heard in how you speak, until you learn to code-switch to fit in at your middle-class secondary school and then at university.
Eventually, it’s not evident to the people around you. Just like your illness, it’s unseen but it lives inside you. It raises its head at dinners with partners who talk about family holidays until you grow smaller with the shame of inexperience.
The impact of poverty
At 28, poverty is easy to access even with a master’s degree, when you’re evicted, when you’re too sick to work and have to move back to the council estate you worked so hard to leave.
Poverty is there again when you get too sick to walk and can’t get the health care you need because you don’t have private health insurance in a country built on a two tier health system.
The thing is these two things that have shaped my lived experience so profoundly are not separate. We know statistically that a person is far more likely to experience chronic illness if they live in poverty. We know that cancer is endemic in poor communities.
We also know that mental health disorders are way more likely to be experienced by those living through the trauma and uncertainty of poverty.
Recently I was talking to my parents about the violence I witnessed as a young child in our community, my father asked “how do you survive it all?” My answer to him was that I was in the psychiatric services from age 10 and have been diagnosed with an onslaught of chronic illnesses since the age of 11.
The other day my mother went to the supermarket and came back to tell me she had met three women from the area on cancer treatment. And I’m used to these stories, I’m used to the slow deaths and quiet emergencies of our lives.
Is this surviving?
As I write this, I’m experiencing fatigue and pain so profound that I feel nauseated. I have two hours a day during which I can physically sit up and I have to make a choice – do I cook food or do I write? Is this surviving?
A life in illness warps how you relate to time. I no longer have whole days to move through, I have hours of lucidity.
When I became bedridden in 2018 with a string of autoimmune illnesses and Lyme Disease, I began to think more and more about health inequality, about what the trauma of poverty does to an individual body.
Ireland is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and yet the class divide is still devastating. I could talk about the lower life-expectancy rates, the suicide rates, the overdoses; but the truth is I grew tired of whole lives being reduced to statistics a long time ago.
So I reached for the thing that never left me no matter how sick or poor I became – writing. You only have to look at the writing of Audre Lorde or James Baldwin and in recent times of Rosaleen McDonagh and Caelainn Hogan to know that for generations of writers, creating art has been a tool of resistance.
And there is something exquisitely defiant about staying alive when the society that is supposed to keep you safe, leaves you to rot. I wanted to create art that speaks from my centre about what it’s like to live in a body in poverty and to be left behind in that experience.
In 2020 I applied for funding through Arts and Disability Ireland to write a poetry pamphlet which explores what happens when a sick society creates a sick body.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve been generously supported by ADI and Poetry Ireland in my work and on the 24th of March I will be showcasing the pamphlet.
My work is not going to solve the problem of class inequality or the pandemic of illnesses within poor communities.
It will however give voice to what is unseen, and I still believe in the power of naming our world in order to change it.
To Love This Body, an evening curated by acclaimed Dublin poet Trudie Gorman, will showcase three women writers who explore themes of class, gender, and the body, with new work from Trudie Gorman, together with poetry from Sophie Meehan and Rosaleen McDonagh and music from special guest Lisa Gorry. Hosted by Poetry Ireland, this free event will take place in Thursday 24 March, 7pm. Belvedere House, Dublin City University, St. Patrick’s Campus, Drumcondra, Dublin 9. Tickets: Free but booking essential via www.poetryireland.ie / Tel: +353 1 6789815
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