Sonya Huber is the author of six books, including the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System and the forthcoming Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. Her essay “Bubbles and Poppies” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
While writing my essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, I began to explore a relationship with my body that was not constrained to the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. I began to lean into examples provided by such beautiful works as Anatole Broyard’s book Intoxicated By My Illness. In an attempt to see what pleasure and joy lay around and with the sensations of pain, I found a way to live with my illness that didn’t define my body as a battlefield or my soul as the loser in that fight.
I then got COVID-19 in early March 2020 as the virus surged on the East Coast of the U.S., before there were tests widely available, before we understood the means of transmission, and even though I’d been careful to restrict my activity. The weeks of illness stretched and stretched as symptoms unfolded, and I became one member of the large category known as “long Covid,” those bodies and minds in which the virus burrows in.
As I struggled to breathe and made my way back and forth from the ER, I couldn’t imagine writing about this fear, this uncertainty. But eventually, after nine months as I began to recover, I found my way in through the same route that I urge my students to explore: detail.
What I love about Elizabeth Hedrick-Moser’s essay “Fluid” (Spring 2018 Intima) is the impulse to love the body that is punctured and struggling. Like Hedrick-Moser, I tried in my brief essay to give the reader a sense of warmth and respite, entering illness sidelong through images of greenery and growth. She remembers yoga in a park; she dips beneath the cool waters of a pond, and these joys thread through her fear and pain. We’ve all been through so much with COVID-19, each calendar of 2020 a map of private and public horror. I tried to use association and subtlety to anchor myself in what remains after the grief and what will heal us.
Sonya Huber is the author of six books, including the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System and the forthcoming Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program. Connect with her on Twitter and IG @sonyahuber. Her essay “Bubbles and Poppies” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine