“What makes you smile? What pierces the fog and reminds you your heart still beats?”
So writes William Doan in one of his hand-drawn frames exploring the interior of mental illness, “Inside Anxiety and Depression” a multimedia video from the Fall 2020 Intima.
It is the ongoingness of Doan’s piece, the reaching for and finding and then refinding comfort amidst an uncertain illness, that connects our work. It is his art-as-touchstone narrative; art as a defiant act of belonging to ourselves.
Underlying the premise of my poem, “Mavis Staples Says to Write About My Blessings,” is a prompt from memoirist and artist Suleika Jaouad’s writing community, The Isolation Journals, offered by Ms. Staples: When stuck in the mud of life, practice taking inventory of what you love. We can forget, and then we are asked to remember.
Even with the astonishing knowledge of medicine, the anatomy of an illness cannot fully be known from the outside. It takes an act of tender and careful acquaintance. And the only one who can truly map the illness of a living being is the occupant of an ill body. The geography of sickness is mysterious: its borders begin vague, its peaks conceal its valleys, its oceans rove and deepen and rearrange patterns of flood and firm ground.
The blessing of art helps us survey new lands. It shades in the map of us, gives truth to blurred lines, unearths pains and delights, and teaches us to bide the gray. It lends us the patience of awe.
William Doan reminds me. Mavis Staples reminds me. My body’s poem reminds me: On the map of illness, mark every gentle place we find to visit again and again.
Doan asks what affirms our aliveness and answers: breath, gratitude, the refuge of art, unmasking ourselves, medication, meditation, acceptance. My poem offers others: seeing art in the ordinary, finding rebirth in not-yet-endings, reaching for connection, becoming a warm home for the winter of our sorrows.
“Resilience,” Doan shares, “is an act of resistance.” And perhaps, too, it is an act of unresisting, of settling into the landscape of our bodies as they are and revisiting, as often as we can, our own self-sung list of the good.
Sarah Piper is a writer and physician living in northern California. Her previous work can be read in the Kindling and in future Elevate issues of Yellow Arrow Journal. Her poem, “Mavis Staples Says to Count My Blessings” appeared in the Spring 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine