To Polly Atkin, “Diagnosis is Like a Wedding”

Photo by Andreas Strandman via Unsplash Often in illness narratives, the diagnosis marks a moment of triumph. There’s an a-ha moment and the main character rejoices, finally having a name for their symptoms. A medication or course of treatment available that might bring the patient to their former body. There is a sense of restoration, the turbulence of symptoms smoothed over with a cure. For Polly Atkin, the binaries presented in these stories have frustrated her. “Either you get better—you’re cured in some way—or you die,” she told me over Zoom. “And we didn’t really want that one, the dying bit.” But what happens when you are left somewhere in-between? In her memoir Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better , Polly Atkin turns her poet’s eye toward living with chronic illness, imagining the experience as a sort of wilderness. In sharp and gorgeously attentive prose, Atkin ruminates on what it might look like for us to release ourselves from the harmful dichotomies that exist around narratives of healing and live instead with an awareness of our bodies as belonging to a teeming, complicated ecosystem. Her own experience being diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome after a lifetime of dismissal, misdiagnosis, and unexplained pain serve as an entrypoint to rich discussions of chronicity, in which Atkin weaves in historical context, observations about the natural world, and meditations on place to point out the lack of language and concrete resources available to individuals who do not have a chance at “getting better” in any traditional sense. Along the way, she also finds true hope in nature, which teaches her how to live with her body rather than struggling against symptoms. I had the opportunity to talk with Atkin over Zoom about harmful cultural perceptions of chronic illness, finding real grace through observations of the natural world, assumptions around diagnoses, and the alluring illusion of returning to a kind of Eden. Jacqueline Alnes: I think there’s a misconception sometimes about chronically ill or disabled people that, if we could, we would cure ourselves and get better. But the subtitle […]

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