My Years of Magical Thinking...

And why I'm calling BS.


There's this idea out there - in the everyday world, in pop culture, in families the world over and sadly still in some medical circles - that you can believe yourself into being well (or that you somehow believed yourself into being sick in the first place).  That all that it takes is wanting to be better badly enough, purely enough, consciously enough, something enough for it to somehow "manifest" in your life.

The idea takes numerous forms - there's the curative power of prayer; the school of 'get up off your ass & do something about it, you whiners' (aka the bootstrappers); the 'but you've got nothing to be sad about/tired from/allergic to' zealots; a million symptom-specific diets; holy water & snake oil & pills made from coral only found in the shadow of the wreck of the Lusitania; and the ever adorable 'Oh we all get headaches/sad/tired sometimes, but you don't see me sitting around complaining about it' crowd.  Those are just a few off the top of my head - there's probably a thousand more we could come up with together (Feel free to leave your gravest offenders in the comments!) but they all have one thing in common - they take a person's illness or disability and make it not a medical condition, or a failure of society to accommodate the needs of that person - but a personal failing on the part of the individual.  They all nullify our personal (individual & cumulative) issues and needs and turn them into something we're doing wrong or not well enough.  And I say bullshit. 

This sort of blame, grounded in magical thinking, shows itself in everything from the rantings of politicians about benefit scroungers, to the old woman in the parking lot who yells at me for being too young to need a handicapped parking spot, to my super-crunchy sister explaining to me that all illness is rooted in "past personal traumas" and "touch therapy" might be the answer for me.  It shows in personal stories of achievement - converts of former patients who swear by whatever method happened to work for them, and preach about it now as if it were the One True Word.  I'm happy for them, truly, but can't get over the amount of gall it would take to assume that what worked for you and your illness must, of course, then work for me (or the millions of others of us who share a disease).  Just because you started running marathons on a diet consisting solely of cough medicine and peach pits, does not mean it would work as well (or at all) for me.  Thanks for telling me about it, now carry on with your business. 

But it's never that simple - the fact that there is a peach pit & cough medicine cure out there, and I am not attempting it: that's unacceptable in society's eyes.  I should be doing everything I can to fight against my illnesses, even if it's contrary to common sense, defies the constraints of financial, emotional or physical realities, &/or is the least likely antidote to whatever ails me & in fact, would make my problem a million times worse.  Society gets to pick if I'm trying hard enough, and {Spoiler Alert} I never will be!!

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I was 15 when I first got sick, nowhere near done figuring out what kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up, and everything I thought I  knew about my world & who I was just... ended.  I wasn't smart anymore, because I would sleep through my classes, and the time I should be doing homework, and miss weeks of school at a time. I wasn't a dancer anymore: after months and months of missing them, on days I could drag myself there, I would go to the one dance class I thought I could manage, do a half-ass job and then curl up in the corner on the gymnastics mats to go to sleep.  I'd gone from teaching three days a week & taking my own classes to barely limping through the basic warm-up at the barre.  

But no one told me to stop: My doctors said I was very sick, but that I "shouldn't give in", that I should "Do what (I) can." To a fifteen-year-old (well, to fifteen-year-old me, anyways) that was like a challenge - "go until you can't go anymore."  And that's exactly what I did: I worked so hard at school (even when I was homeschooling) that when summer came around, I was bedridden.  I still can't watch the show tape from that last year, when I lost out on my first solo and instead hobbled through the one number in the recital I had to nearly kill myself dancing through.  Afterwards, laying in the wings, waiting for my heartbeat to slow and my vision to come back (looking back it's likely my POTS/NMH issues were a problem even then), I thought to myself: "Well, was that worth dying for?" 

But I didn't stop pushing, because everybody told me I shouldn't.  My family constantly told me that I just had to keep trying, my teachers said that "surely, someone as smart as you can figure out how to beat this," my friends nagged that I'd been sick long enough, already, hadn't I?  I know that they were trying to be encouraging, but it was the only message I heard, that I had to battle, until I won. That it would be like giving up, to say that I might have to live with this illness instead of fighting against it. The doctors made sure I knew that if I started to "act like I was sick" I would only get worse: "Don't give in," they would tell me, "keep fighting."  So I did.  For (as it turned out, way too many) years.

My parents, armed with the same doctor's advice - "don't let her give into it, because then she could be sick forever"- were as ill-equipped to deal with our new situation as I was.  Never mind that I was sick right then and that might have been important to deal with.  Nope, the now was always about the fight,  and so we spent a good portion of what was left of my teenage years fighting against the CFS, and often against each other, when it seemed to them that I was "giving in" to it:  When it got to the point that I couldn't eat, and I lost about 35 pounds like it was water weight, I can remember having screaming matches with my dad at the table where he would say such helpful things as "JUST PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH AND EAT IT FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!!!" and I just... couldn't.  It tasted like ash - everything did - and burned all the way down, where it would sit, heavy as winter boots until my belly revolted and back up it came. I would cry and he would yell that I was making myself sicker, with the crying.   Or being in the car on the receiving end of glares from my siblings, when they all wanted to go someplace and I was too exhausted to move, let alone get out of the car again, and my sister closing the door, rolling her eyes and saying "Well, I guess, if you're going to be that "sick", we'll all just stop having fun now" as we drove home.

We didn't know, is my point: Nobody gave me - or them - the skills. Maybe, with something like an aggressive cancer, the doctors would've been right on target - 'fight back, till its gone: take no prisoners, grant no quarter!'  But I had something nobody knew what to with, a chronic illness with no known treatment, cause, cure. And so their advice was way off the mark. It was like I was diagnosed with CFS (and later Fibro & POTS & now the diabetes, not to mention the 14 other things in between and the one big question mark they're all still looking for as the Holy Grail) and instead of a treatment plan, with meds to take and dos and don'ts to follow, all they told me is "You have it, but pretend you don't, as much as is possible."  And that was some damn bad advice.

It was wrong and dangerous, and it could've been - on more than one occasion for me- deadly.  (Turns out ignoring pneumonia is potentially a bad thing: who knew?)

That's why this fallacy of magical thinking gets me so upset - because it took a fifteen-year-old girl who could have learned the skills she needed to manage a chronic illness and continue to live a full (if different) life, and left her helpless, terrified and vulnerable. And blaming herself.  

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So, I didn't have the skills, or the treatment plan, or the answers, but everybody kept telling me that they were out there: keep trying till you find The Cure. So I tried all the crazy shit that you think you are not desperate enough to go near: pills with high price tags and exorbitant claims; cleansings and energy work and fasting rituals; diets and doing an hour of PT every Friday that takes you until Thursday to recover from; pushing yourself way beyond what your body is actually capable of.  The doctors might roll their eyes at my latest endeavor, or be all for it -"couldn't hurt" I had more than one of them tell me, even though they were 100% wrong-  but they didn't have anything better to offer, so it was up to me to follow the magical thinking train as far as it would take me.

It goes pretty far, you know: you work so hard at convincing yourself that you're getting better, while your hospitalization rate soars and your immune system falters.  You can laugh with the doctors about that "last bit of voodoo you tried" all the while you're planning how you'll scrape up the money for your next.  You can fuel that train with all of the self-hatred you accumulate when people tell you that you're just being lazy, or that you're faking, or that if you really, really tried, you could do it.  (That's a never ending, renewable resource right there: look, I fixed the economy!)

But in the end, it didn't matter how often I thought maybe this pill was helping or that I just had to make it through the next 14 sessions and the acupuncture would clear everything up.  In the end, I was sicker than when I started, discouraged at myself for failing and certain that if I just tried hard enough, like everybody said, I could beat this thing.  

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There's a lot of maybes about my illnesses - maybe if I'd never gotten the mono, it wouldn't have switched on whatever self destruct sequence is probably hiding in my genetic code, or maybe if I'd gone to see a specialist right away s/he would've recognized the problem before it spiraled into today's current chaos. Maybe X or maybe Y. I don't know about any of that.

But there's one certainty about the whole mess: It could've been better.  My experience did not have to be as hellish as it often was.  It didn't have to be as isolating, and full of blame as it was: Because everybody - from my teachers to my sisters to my grandmother who couldn't understand why I'd cry when she suggested I go to a faith healer - blamed me at some point.  I'm not saying it would've been a land of rainbows and puppies - hell I don't buy into magical thinking now, and my life is certainly pretty puppy-less - but it could've been better than what it was.

And that's where society and medicine and the world with all of it's "The power of the Secret of thinking with your wholeheart and wanting it with your entire being" bullshit failed 15-year-old me, and 32-year-old me, and the 3-year-old with learning disabilities that I used to tutor, and my sister who has depression, and basically every disability activist I've ever met; and every person with a disability, and their families and my parents, and, well, the whole world, honestly.  It isn't enough to wish it away - that wishes us away, too.  It doesn't honor who we are to be told that we're just not doing enough to be well, or that we worried ourselves into being sick, or that if I looked on the bright side more often, I would somehow no longer be allergic to all of the contents of the natural world.  It's bullshit is what it is, and I'm going to call you on it, now that I know it for lies.

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It wasn't until I got to college and started meeting other people with disabilities and allies and advocates and started paying attention to the people who said: "Listen, it might get better: You never know, you might wake up tomorrow and be healed and awesome.  But there are ways to make today easier to live through, to be awesome with a chronic illness, and one of them is NOT FIGHTING quite so much.  It's accepting that you're sick.  You're a sick person, a disabled person, and ... you know what?  That's fine, too.  You're not lesser, or weaker, or anything negative because you're sick.  You're just sick.  It's a part of who you are, and you need to deal with it, because this fighting with it is just making everything worse." 

I cringe to remember my Freshman self, saying to a professor that I was "Not disabled: just temporarily out of service."   She was polite enough not to say anything, but I want to go back and punch myself in the face for that flippant nonsense: I really thought that not claiming part of myself would be beneficial?  For who?  Was it supposed to be funny? It seems absurd and sad now - I don't even know. I do know that when I finally made myself face the fact that all of this magical thinking was getting me nowhere, was in fact hurting more than it was helping, it was devastating to me: Not being able to cure myself, I must instead of course be a complete failure.  (It was this all or nothing attitude that really helped my depression stay around as long as it did, unfortunately.) There was no middle ground for me, and realizing that people were wrong and I wasn't going to be able to think myself better?  That all the pushing my body through shit was actually making things worse?  It was like stepping out into empty air yet again - I had no idea what could be next for me, if everything I knew how to do - if fighting & believing that it could all just magically go away one day - was wrong.

But once I got past that, once I accepted that truth, I learned so many ways to make my life better, to make it more meaningful, to work towards not just marking time until I got better, but living through that time, because this is my life now.  It's a life with chronic illness, and yeah, I'd rather it wasn't, but wishing doesn't make it so, so get to living & dealing with it, because it's a part of my life, but it's not all that I am.


And that's a truth I worked long and hard to find - and it still takes some work to remember that it applies to me - that there's societal constructs at work behind my feeling of just not doing enough to fix myself, and that I'm not really a lazy, layabout who'd rather play on the Internet all day then get a real job. That 16 doctors appointments in the space of three weeks is more than enough, even if they're not giving me the answers I need.  That eating french toast today instead of a salad like every other day, and is not the reason I'll obviously never get better.  To remember that there are reasonable levels of self-care and coping strategies, and then there's just plain false hope.    

And the idea that I might have gotten to that point so much sooner if somebody had been around to say to me "Magical thinking isn't going to cut it. There may a cure out there, but it's probably not going to be found in this guy's car trunk." (True story) "And as far as I can tell, there's nobody around to provide you with a deus ex machina, so get to living with this instead of waiting for it to get gone."  

But that's why I talk about magical cures when they pop up in what I'm reading or watching.  It's why I get into arguments with the people in my life who dole out advice on seaweed pills along with our shared breakfast. And it's why I'll keep talking about it here. Because somewhere there's a fifteen-year-old girl, with an illness she did nothing to cause and she can do nothing to get rid of.  And she deserves to hear the truth. Not the fluffy, Secret-based philosophy of pseudo-cures and self-blame.  But the facts: That chronic illness & disability are just another part of life, and you can deal with them, and treat them, and live with them, and even thrive with them - to the best of your ability - but you can't, not ever, think your way out of them.


 *Welcome to all the Blogging Against Disability Day readers - I know there's a million great posts to be read, so I really appreciate it if you made it all the way through that!  If you're one of my regular readers, please head over to the Goldfish's place, and read some of the other excellent BADD posts: I promise, you'll learn a lot.*