#Meghan O’Rourke

[havingapoemwithyou]

unforced error by Meghan O’Rourke

[wedarkacademia]

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall. — Meghan O’Rourke

[luxe-pauvre]

The hardest thing to convey to doctors or friends was the debilitating fatigue, which many other patients I knew experienced as well. Complaining of fatigue sounds like moral weakness; in New York City, tired is normal. But the fatigue of physical dysfunction, I came to recognize, is as different from normal sleep deprivation as COVID-19 is from the common cold. It was not caused by needing sleep, I thought, but by my body’s cellular conviction that it needed to conserve energy in order to fix whatever was wrong. The feeling erased my will, the sense of identity that drives most of us. The worst part of my fatigue was the loss of an intact sense of self. It wasn’t just that I suffered brain fog; it wasn’t just the loss of self that sociologists talk about in connection with chronic illness, in which everything you know about yourself disappears and you have to build a different life. Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. […] To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you. “Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct,” Daudet writes—a line I now often thought of.

Meghan O’Rourke, Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness

[aldieb]

“To the extent that illness is a quest, it brings you to a very different place from the one you thought you were trying to get to. And so I am wary of papering over illness’s real ravages with false pieties that allow us to look away from the true price exacted.

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so. (They usually stem from the sufferer’s having reached a place in the illness that makes it more bearable than it once was.) In the dark room where I listened to life happen around me when I was sick, I yielded a part of myself forever.

This was an important event, and it is one that keeps on happening in my life. It moves in spiral time around the linear life I sometimes think I live.”

—The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke

[cozybi]

meghan o’rourke, unforced error

[april-is]

April 23, 2024: Available Now: Archaic Torsos of Both Sexes

Available Now: Archaic Torsos of Both Sexes Gregory Orr

Though I'm modest as most, I couldn't help noticing certain parts of the statues have been polished to a high sheen by passing hands as the centuries passed. If it's a form of worship it's not much odder or more perverse than the saint's stone toe kissed to a stub by fervent lips.

And even though Plato suspected art almost as much as he suspected the body's curves, he did assert Desire could lead to the True and Beautiful. Therefore I choose to believe that mortals pausing here to cup a marble breast or buttock were doing their best to grasp the Ideal— and their foolish gestures made it shine more brightly.

--

Today in:

2023: Search Patrols, Ilya Kaminsky 2022: The Problem with Travel, Ada Limón 2021: When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind Of Like Being A Chicago Bulls Fan, Hanif Abdurraqib 2020:from Children Walk on Chairs to Cross a Flooded Schoolyard, Patrick Rosal 2019: If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already At My Feet, Hanif Abdurraqib 2018: Bliss and Grief, Marie Ponsot 2017: Verge, Mark Doty 2016: Ever, Meghan O’Rourke 2015: The Two Times I Loved You the Most In a Car, Dorothea Grossman2014: May Day, Phillis Levin 2013: The Triumph of the Infinite, Mark Strand 2012: Mermaid Song, Kim Addonizio 2011: the laughing heart, Charles Bukowski 2010: from Jenny, Genya Turovskaya 2009: A Step Away From Them, Frank O’Hara 2008: Entry, Lisa Sewell 2007: Meanwhile, Richard Siken 2006: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka 2005: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

[l-just-want-to-see]

A dream is the only way to breathe. / But you must / find a more useful way to live. 9/10

Poem of Regret for an Old Friend, Meghan O’Rourke

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[myinfinitevariety]

and then what were our names

did you love me or did i misunderstand

is it terrible

— The Night Where You No Longer Live by Meghan O’Rourke

[distort-opia]

Sumita Chakraborty, The B-Sides of the Golden Records, Track Five: “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” // Detective Comics (2016) #1000 -- The Batman's Design // Meghan O’Rourke, Sun in Days // Batman (2011) #48 -- Superheavy // Mary Oliver, from “Hum, Hum”, A Thousand Mornings // Batman (2016) #68 -- Knightmares // Hereditary (2018) // Detective Comics (2016) #999 -- Mythology // Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist // Detective Comics (2016) #1027 -- The Gift //Jihyun Yun, from "The Leaving Season," Some Are Always Hungry //

[the-forest-library]

Best Reads of 2022: Non-Fiction

We’re living in the golden age of chronic illness and trauma memoirs. These books made me feel seen and will stick with me for a long time.

What Doesn’t Kill You - Tessa Miller

What My Bones Know - Stephanie Foo

The Invisible Kingdom - Meghan O’Rourke

Know My Name - Chanel Miller

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone - Lori Gottlieb

Good Morning Monster - Catherine Gildiner

Ten Steps to Nanette - Hannah Gadsby

Dinners with Ruth - Nina Totenberg

Leave Only Footprints - Conor Knighton

The Book of Boundaries - Melissa Urban

I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy

Dancing at the Pity Party - Tyler Feder

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States - Sarah Vowell

The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk

The Vagina Bible - Jennifer Gunter

Amazing Facts about Baby Animals - Maja Safstrom

The Illustrated Compendium of Amazing Animal Facts - Maja Safstrom

Animals of a Bygone Era - Maja Safstrom

[lateonsetemo]

get to know you game! answer the questions & tag folks you want to get to know better!

thanks @nova-leaf for the tag <3

last song listened to: listen up - oasis (mtv unplugged version)

currently reading: the invisible kingdom- meghan o’rourke (it’s been a bit since i picked it up so i may need to start fresh) (it’s about reimagining chronic illnesses by investigating their invisibility)

currently watching: doctor who. very tumblr of me but it’s my first watchthrough and my best friend got me hooked on it

currently obsessed with: obviously atla/tlok but less obviously gravity falls has had a chokehold on me recently. maybe obvious on my blog but not irl! also my beloved kitty marvin. he deserves the world and i will find a way to give it to him.

no-pressure tags: @dykevirgo @ducks-and-dinos @decentmonster

& anyone else feel free to hop in!

[nightraider19]

All 26 quotes from They say All the World's a Stage.

Edmond Jabés, The Book of Questions // Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dimension 20 // Anne Carson, Red Doc // Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping// Langston Hughes, I loved my friend // Fatima Asghar, How'd Your Parents Die Again? // I Guess The Old You Is A Ghost // No More, Into The Woods // Daydream, Shanike Priyananda // Tumblr User floatingstirnerhead // Meghan O’Rourke, The Night Where You No Longer Live // M.A.W, you are not heads or tails; you are the coin // Victoria Hannan, Kokomo // Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves // Seperation, W.S Merwin // Sing-shong, Omniscient Readet's Viewpoint, Chapter 490: Author's Viewpoint // @/cakeractuallyarts piece for the mcytblr aufest // Prologue, Into The Woods // Sue Zhao // John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back // George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge // Fausto Melotti L'uomo Costat (1936) // Last Fragment, Raymond Carver // Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes // The Baker's Wife, Into The Woods // The Witch, Children Will Listen // Richard Siken, War of the Foxes // Barbara Crooker Gold: "Grief"

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

not me almost crying with weird cathartic joy listening to jameela’s latest podcast ep on invisible illnesses with meghan o’rourke!

[luxe-pauvre]

I had the sensation that I needed to find a better story to tell about my condition, because of course I had no story at all. In her poignant memoir A Body, Undone, about a bike accident that left her largely paralyzed, the scholar Christina Crosby writes, “Whenever you offer an account of yourself to others, you labor to present yourself as coherent and worthy of recognition and attention, as I am doing right now.” This labor was precisely what I was failing to perform; in my fatigue and pain I couldn’t find the words to make myself legible to others. (And I still have not found them. This text is full of silences and vagueness and lacunae: when I write “brain fog,” I imagine that your mind slides over the idea, unless you, too, have suffered from it.) In the absence of that recognition, I began to see myself as not only incoherent but also unworthy, ashamed that I craved comfort from others.

Meghan O’Rourke, Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness

[aldieb]

“When you get seriously ill, either with a chronic illness or a grave disease like cancer, your sense of story is disrupted. As Arthur Frank puts it, ‘The body sets in motion the need for new stories when its disease disrupts the old stories,’ forcing the patient to ‘learn “to think differently.”’ The new stories we tell matter, Frank argues, because they ‘repair the damage’ that being sick has done to the ill person’s self-understanding.

Frank identifies three kinds of illness stories: restitution narratives, chaos narratives, and quest narratives. In restitution narratives, the sickness is bearable because the ill people believe that in the end they will get better. Restitution narratives emphasize recovery over the reality of illness. In fact, the restitution narrative could be called the dominant mode of late-capitalist illness narratives. As Frank notes, ‘Contemporary culture treats health as the normal condition that people ought to have restored.’ Frank himself had cancer. During his treatment, he noticed that health care workers interpreted his experiences ‘within a narrative of movement toward recovery of health.’

Chronic illness, though, is hard to map onto a restitution narrative. It is almost by definition never a story of overcoming, because the disease’s trajectory never fully resolves. And so many sick people find themselves in Frank’s second kind of story, the chaos narrative. As Frank notes, ‘events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality.’ While the idea of restitution is inherently narrative (First I got sick, then I got better), chaos is ‘anti-narrative’; these stories are hard to hear. Buffeted by endless medical tests, searching for answers, sick people are often a ‘narrative wreck,’ in a phrase Frank borrows from the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin.

The final story is what Frank calls the quest narrative, a story in which the patient has been able to synthesize her experience into a meaning of some kind—although it’s usually not the meaning (recovery) that she thought she’d find when she first got sick. Inherent in the quest narrative is ‘searching for alternative ways of being ill.’ The quest becomes clear only after the sick person experiences a deeper initiation into the world of illness, identifying the way that she has been transformed by it. In quest narratives, speakers find that the act of telling restores some of the control and sense of meaning they had lost. Think of Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered from debilitating headaches, writing, ‘I have given a name to my pain, and call it “dog.” . . . I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.’”

—The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke

[wellconstructedsentences]

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke