There was a moment, deep in the throes of her illness, when Emma Hardy realised she was never getting better. There was no cure for her: only ways to manage. At that time she was not managing very well.
Of course, writing about her past self in this way gives the illusion that she was once in the throes of her illness and that it did get better. This is deceptive. She lives with a chronic illness called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. It is a severe form of premenstrual illness that leads to depression, anger and even suicidal ideation. It rears its head in the week or two before menstruation then goes away. One week she would be lying on her bedroom floor, unable to move, starting fights with her partner. Then her period would come and she would be back at work, seemingly fine, and completely oblivious to the person she had been mere days before. Notably, this illness is chronic and recurring. She is always in, or just out of, or about to enter the throes of her illness. It does not get better in any static sense.
The Hero's Journey Fails Chronic Illness
In Western culture, the dominant narrative structure is that of the hero's journey. A singular character is called to adventure. At first, they refuse the call, fearing the unknown. Then, with wise words from a mentor and their allies, they accept their fate. Their world shifts. After one or two false victories and a new mindset, they take on their biggest challenge and overcome it. They return a hero.
Many stories about illness follow a similar narrative arc. There is an inciting incident: someone gets sick. The person does not want to be sick. The illness is eventually accepted, bravely fought, and our hero either gets better, or they don't, and they die. This is a narrative structure that relies on closure. It values transformation over endurance. But it has nothing in common with how chronic illness actually plays out.
Since releasing her memoir about premenstrual illness, Periodic Bitch, Hardy is often asked about how she is now. Each time she is asked this question, she feels an overwhelming urge to neaten the narrative and say that she is good. She wants to tell a hero's story. Despite knowing otherwise, she wants to tell people that she is fine now. She is better.
But her diagnosis was not a call to adventure. And for people living with chronic and recurring illnesses like hers, there is no neat recovery. They do not get to return as heroes. Through the narrow lens of the hero's journey – they either get better, or they die – chronic illness quickly becomes terminal. How, then, to live with an illness that comes back? How to tell a story about illness that does not end in death, or recovery, but allows for life with illness?
Finding New Narrative Shapes
Hardy began to look for new shapes with which she could tell her story. In Jane Alison's book on narrative patterns, Meander, Spiral, Explode, she describes how narrative patterns can follow shapes found in nature. The hero's journey follows the pattern of an arc, or a wave. "There's power in a wave, its sense of beginning, midpoint and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories," Alison writes, then goes on to equate this structure to that of a male orgasm: "But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?"
Hardy finds this both funny and transformative. There are so many patterns to draw on beyond waves or arcs or hero's journeys. She realised she did not need to tell her story in a straight line with a neat ending. There are alternative ways to tell a story. Just as her illness loops around, so can the stories she tells about it.
One example of this is the spiral. It is a pattern fit for recurring illnesses, or looping obsessions, or stories told over years as the Earth spirals around the sun. Hardy thinks if a narrative arc is a male orgasm, a narrative spiral might be a female one: building, repeating, ongoing.
She wants to write herself a world in which illness narratives do not have to be neat or digestible, but can be messy and real. The neat moral lessons of the hero's journey do not help her when her body will not re-enact that story. A neat ending does not help her live her messy middle. She wanted to allow room for patterns, repetitions, for looping back to the same moment, only with new understanding. She finds hope in a spiral. She is still here. The story continues. There is meaning, perhaps even pleasure, in that.
Periodic Bitch by Emma Hardy is out now (A$29.99, Allen & Unwin).
