It is the second spring consumed by the Covid-19 pandemic. I am supposed to be at work on my memoir. That is what I have sold this book as: a memoir. In some sense, it is a relief. Autobiographical writing’s sustaining fiction—that the writer and the subject are a cohesive, singular entity—can now be, explicitly, my object of contemplation. In another sense, it is bewildering: in graduate school, my work tended to be read as personal even when I was abstracting or writing in the third person. While I try not to get hung up on distinctions that are inconsequential outside the scope of book marketing, I know that if I am to offer an account undeniably of myself, it ought to be coherent, worthy of consideration—yet, my sense of a coherent self has been marred. Illness lends a certain understanding of this fragmentation of the observing/observed self.

The publisher’s announcement of this book’s future release describes it as “a memoir of revelation through chronic pain.”

But I don’t think pain is revelatory, I complained to a friend upon reading this. I don’t think my pain has taught me anything.

When someone suggests that surely there are lessons or positives to be taken away from pain and suffering, it sounds as tone-deaf as the unsolicited suggestions of diets or healers—a vain, human effort to ascribe meaning when there is none. Such suggestions usually come from the sort of optimist who seeks to make the pain of witness more bearable, who cannot stand the reality not only that chronic illness can seldom be triumphed over, but also that it does not necessarily teach us anything or help us grow. My worst self is the embodied result of pain and suffering. If someone is telling you their cautionary tale, it means that caution was not heeded. In the case of illness, it can’t be: if you are young and well, you will not be so indefinitely, and there is nothing I can write to relieve a future sufferer of anxiety toward a future illness. There will be no lessons or imparted wisdom. It will not be worth it. The fundamental ungraciousness of choosing to tell this story—a story from which the only “wisdom” to be gleaned is a knowledge both structural and personal of the hell our capitalist arrangement of the world creates for the sick—is not lost on me.

Nevertheless, I want a painful clarity of illness. I want to prioritize concrete detail over abstraction, to reject that a story of endurance can be granted resolution. Unwavering commitment to the truth in the face of plummeting corporeal possibility is nearly impossible. Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, wrote that, in her final days of treatment for myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), his mother seemed to need “to find a way to look away and yet to feel as if she were not looking away, that it was an impossible balancing act. For it was as if she were trying to remain loyal to the idea of the truth and to the supremacy of the factual yet at the same time looking for ways to deny what these facts suggested.” How we feel we ought to act in the face of immense pain and what we are capable of are seldom aligned. Rieff recalls reading one of Sontag’s journal entries, written after her breast cancer surgery years prior: “Despair shall set you free.” He initially assumed his mother was making a morbid joke, but she continues entirely in earnest: “I can’t write because I don’t (won’t) give myself permission to voice the despair I feel. Always the will. My refusal of despair is blocking my energies.”

“I lived on a high horse,” Sontag writes in another entry, “without saddle sores.”

I live on a high horse with all kinds of sores.