Karly

A week ago, I said I was going to lock in, which is to say I announced, both to myself and to the vague audience that exists in my head, that I was about to become the kind of person who wakes up early, works consistently, produces things on time, and generally behaves as if her life were governed by intention rather than interruption, and then my trigeminal nerve said no, not dramatically, not even all at once, but in that insidious way that makes you realise, halfway through a perfectly ordinary day, that your body has its own timeline and it isn’t consulting you.

There is an essay by Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, in which she writes about illness as something that returns us, in a way, to childhood, to a state of dependence, of being looked after, of being removed from the structures of adult life, and while I can see what she means, and Chels has actually written about this far more extensively if you want a deeper dive into Woolf’s argument, I find myself resisting that framing slightly, because while there may be a regression of the body, a narrowing of what it can do, I don’t experience it as a return to being cared for, but rather as something I prefer to move through alone.

And perhaps that’s the first thing worth saying clearly, if only to situate the rest of this properly, which is that this isn’t a post asking for pity, not because there’s anything inherently wrong with being cared for or even pitied, but because I’ve been ill many times, in ways that have been acute, painful, and at times absurdly inconvenient, kidney stones, gallstones, and now trigeminal neuralgia, and what that has given me is not a desire to be witnessed in suffering but a certain familiarity with it, a sense that this, too, is part of the rhythm of things, even if it’s a rhythm I wouldn’t have chosen.

What I wasn’t entirely prepared for, however, was the way trigeminal neuralgia exposes the limits of language, because how do you describe pain that feels electrical without sounding metaphorical, how do you explain something that interrupts thought itself, that arrives not as a build-up but as a rupture, that cuts through whatever you were doing, whatever you were saying, whatever you were thinking, and leaves you there, suspended, as if the sentence has been abandoned mid-clause.

I said I was going to lock in, as if productivity were a promise I could keep, as if my nervous system weren’t capable of staging a small but decisive coup, and what I realised, slowly and somewhat unwillingly, is that the problem isn’t simply the pain itself, although that would be enough, but everything that follows it, the days that don’t quite belong to me, the drowsiness that comes from medication, the strange cognitive fog that makes even the simplest tasks feel slightly out of reach, as if I’ve returned to my life but haven’t fully re-entered it.

People like to imagine pain as an event, something that happens and then stops, something that can be plotted neatly on a timeline, but what this has shown me is that the timeline itself becomes unreliable, because even when the pain subsides there is still a residue, a sense that my body has closed the document but not saved the work, and I’m left trying to pick up from a version of myself that no longer quite exists.

There is also, and this is perhaps the more uncomfortable part, the question of what this does to the idea of a “normal” life, by which I mean the kind of life that is structured around consistency, around showing up every day, around being the sort of person who can be relied upon in ways that are legible to institutions, and I found myself thinking, not entirely jokingly, that no one would want to hire someone who might have to disappear for ten days at a time, someone whose body might at any moment refuse to cooperate, someone whose recovery isn’t immediate but extended, complicated, and slightly opaque.

And the more I sat with that thought, the more I realised it wasn’t even mine alone, because this is true for people living with endometriosis and other chronic illnesses that flare and recede without regard for deadlines, for anyone whose body doesn’t perform consistency on command, which is to say that what we call “reliability” is often just a reflection of whose bodies happen to align with a very narrow idea of normal.

There is something almost ironic about the way pain resists language, because we do have words for it, we say “it hurts,” we say “it’s bad,” we say “it’s unbearable,” and yet none of those utterances carry the force of the experience, they function as a kind of failed speech act, an attempt to communicate something that can’t be fully transmitted, because the listener maps it onto their own experience, onto something manageable, something that doesn’t quite reach the intensity being described.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with that yet, or with the fact that my timeline is no longer something I can map out with any real confidence, but I am beginning to suspect that “locking in” was never really the point, that the idea of becoming a perfectly consistent, endlessly productive version of myself was always contingent on a set of conditions that I took for granted, conditions that, as it turns out, aren’t guaranteed.

What I do know is that this isn’t, despite everything, a story about giving up, or about resigning myself to a smaller life, because that framing feels both too dramatic and not quite accurate, but rather about paying attention to the ways in which the body complicates the narratives we like to tell about ourselves, about ambition, about discipline, about time, and about what it means to be “on track,” because if there is one thing this has made very clear, it’s that the track itself isn’t as stable as we pretend it is.

And so I find myself, somewhat unexpectedly, in what I can only describe as a recovery era, if you can even call it that, not in the sense of a clean resolution or a neat return to normal, but in a more ambiguous way, watching new episodes of Outlander, making small plans again, and preparing, quite seriously, to go and see The Devil Wears Prada 2, because yes, I will be there, and I will be seated, after all Miranda Priestly was and still is the blueprint.