Re-entry post illness

The barriers to clearing out the mind after the body purges itself

vol. 7 issue 1

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Greetings,

Have you ever been so sick, and for so long, that as you recuperate and return to your routine, you feel as though you are an expatriate visiting the land of your former life?

That has been my journey these past several weeks.

I had covid, or maybe I didn’t, given that the tests I took contradicted themselves. But, I had difficulty breathing enough oxygen into my lungs such that I couldn’t even walk my dog without dropping to my knees and resting in the snow every 20 paces or so. Eventually, some of the many people who were looking in on me came and took my dog away until I was able to stand and walk again.

Once I thought I was well enough to work, I immediately had if not the norovirus, then something devilishly akin, and that took me out for another week.

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The miserable Christmas I had seems so far in the past now, that the post I wrote for you that day describes an emotional state I can barely recall having. So, I will keep it in my drafts file rather than send it to you.

All the activities I hadn’t been well enough to attend, I heard about from friends who checked in on me. I had missed weeks of shared community activities, and felt on the outside. Slowly, I am returning to the fold.

As to my re-entry…

Having not spent much time watching things on screens for most of 2024, the tail end of it found me incessantly doing so in my misery and pain. Here’s a sampling:

The Lost King, a British film based on the true story of Philippa Langley, a woman (played by Sally Hawkins) with no credentials having to fight the dumb ass experts at a university for her right to claim that she is the one who found the remains of the much maligned Richard the III, and that it helped prove he wasn’t the murderous monster the Tudors wished us to believe. (If you didn’t already know, it’s no longer accurate to call him a usurper.)

The Taste of Things, a French love story told through the food prepared by a cook (Juliette Binoche) who prefers not to become la Femme de la Maison, but does anyway. You could say that it kills her. The film has a typically weird and extraneous French film ending, but you can avoid that and just turn off the stream as Monsieur et la jeune fille walk out of the kitchen. You will know the moment when you see it. It is the actual, natural ending of the story.

And, on my birthday (I passed that day sick as hell), I watched one of my all-time favorite movies, Local Hero, which is the charming and funny story of a hard core American oil man (Peter Reigert) sent to the North of Scotland to buy 12 miles of coastline for an oil refinery. Things don’t go to plan, however. It’s also Peter Capaldi’s first film and he is so gawky and shy, which is sweet to see as he kisses a mermaid’s webbed feet, not knowing what he’s gotten himself into.

Iona is a strange film that should have been made by Wim Wenders, but wasn’t. Scott Graham wrote and directed a series of mise en scenes strung together as an impressionistic story of…? Not sure, betrayal? Unrequited love? Domestic violence? Star crossed lovers? Fundamentalism? I mean, take your pick.

But it was shot on the Scottish isle of Iona, and features the luminous Ruth Negga and the modern day Viking, Douglas Henshall, so I was compelled to watch, even if I was irritated doing so, given that I prefer plots to strings of pictures. Wenders would know what I mean.

Speaking of Henshall, I also obsessively watched seasons 1-7 of Shetland, with him as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez. I loved every single moment of every single scene. I cannot be bothered to watch seasons 8 and 9 without Perez.

And so I entered 2025 with pictures others created, placed in my mind’s eye. All of them lovely, artfully created images, but still, images not of my own observations of life and its activities.

Unbidden, I found these images would pop up when I did not expect them. Making tea, I would imagine Henshall’s DI Perez gripping his mug, handed to him by a suspect at whose house he has come to call to ask for a “statement”. Or, while attempting to make something I might be able to eat and keep down, I saw La Binoche as la Femme at her range, slowly stirring a buttery sauce in a copper pot. Deciding to get dressed in something other than pajamas, I saw Sally Hawkins’s Philippa Langley in her droopy yellow sweater, belted over a pair of hideous, too-short khakis.

It has taken some time to cleanse these images from my catalogue of references for my daily activities. There’s nothing wrong with consuming entertainment based on images, but it does cause me to contemplate how much we take for granted is our own set of reference points on things. Maybe we should make more of an effort to understand how all such stimuli worms into us.

The media in our minds is like a set of eternally chattering parents we don’t even realize we have internalized as our own stream of consciousness, flashing pictures at us, shaping our thoughts, actions, and even beliefs. I don’t like it.

Not only did I need to penetrate the fog of illness at the dawn of 2025, I had to cut through several others’ renderings of the basics such as getting dressed and feeding myself, even if the images portrayed distant eras and locations.

The land of my own mind is a place that is fresh every time I open my eyes there. But after having been carried through the streaming channels, away from my own thoughts and into the land of images media want us to just take for granted we’re supposed to consume, I see how precious and rare my inner landscape is, and that it must be protected.

When you come back from being “out of it” for days, barely able to eat or breathe, you feel out of touch. But when you re-enter your routine via a tunnel of constructs not of your own making, and are hyper conscious of their alien nature compared with your own delineations of the world, it is difficult to know where to place your feet.

But, I am up for the challenge.

Walk on in peace,

Whitney

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I feel obligated to acknowledge that it’s annoying to have paid for a subscription to an irregular publication. It has been some weeks since I could think straight enough to post, but if you’re not happy with my irregular posting schedule, and are mad at me as a result, please do not stay subscribed. I hate to disappoint you. Here’re the instructions for how to unsubscribe as a paid subscriber.

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