Controlled burn

Controlled burn: A controlled or prescribed burn, also known as hazard reduction burning, backfire, swailing, or a burn-off, is a wildfire set intentionally for purposes of forest management, farming, prairie restoration or greenhouse gas abatement.*

I left my husband when I was 26.

We had been together for six years, years that were sometimes bad, but mostly good. We had a black shepherd-cross called Luna and a rented apartment in West Vancouver with high ceilings and fake wooden floors. For the better part of a year we had been travelling around Europe in a campervan with the shepherd-cross. Trying to salvage the relationship.

In Germany, we toasted to frothy beer and tried to figure out how to grow back together with awkward, stilted conversation. What's your favourite colour? we asked, over the happy chattering of passing holiday tourists. What was your favourite memory from our wedding?

In Switzerland, I drank burnt McDonald’s coffee and emailed my friend about weed in Amsterdam and dancing with gypsies in Portugal. “Times are good,” I wrote, “but the marriage isn’t.”

In Denmark, we sat on the floral coverlet in his friend’s guest room and tried to find answers to the questions that were too heart-breaking to speak out loud.

“Luna should go with you, of course,” I said. “She would be happier in Canada.”

“Of course we will see each other again,” he said with commendable optimism.

In Cyprus, he tried to lighten the mood by singing Rhianna on the way to the airport. All of Cyprus, it seemed, was dusty and barren, the soil pockmarked with spiky anaemic-looking cacti. On the flight to Australia, I got drunk on soda and tiny bottles of vodka. They dwarfed my hand and made me feel like a giant. I played word games on the in-flight entertainment console with an Englishman named Paul. I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt anything at all.

Almost a year later, my joints became tender and swollen. Within weeks I had put on an inexplicable 10 kilos and was bed-ridden. This was most inconvenient, as I was close to publishing my first book and finishing a Master’s degree. I was living with a guy who felt like a stranger to me. I didn’t know his middle name, couldn’t recall his birthday. Sunlight gave me a rash, and food became a “will-this-make-me-break-out-in-hives?” Russian roulette. I slept for 18 hours a day. I forgot the names of my friends. Everything hurt.

Invariably I was told that it was chronic fatigue syndrome, mercury overload, leaky gut, Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, food intolerances, mould toxicity, adrenal fatigue, parasites.

It was easy to tell me what I had, but impossible to answer the question I really needed an answer for. How could I make it go away?

I missed all the things I used to take for granted. Ciders with friends at the uni bar after lectures. Having conversations with people without feeling disjointed and confused. Walking my dogs. I missed the sunshine. I missed myself.

We tried it all. The guy I was with became hyper-focused on making me better. He sent me to the best doctors and specialists. Blood tests, stool tests, urine tests. Supplements, chiropractic, immune suppressants, kinesiology, pain medication, special diets, fasts, vitamins. He had to fix me, because the alternative was too much to bear.

Eventually, a young blonde doctor regarded me with a mix of rehearsed empathy and total indifference.

“You’ll just need to get used to a different kind of normal,” she said.

The guy and I went on a holiday. He thought it would help. I slept in hotel rooms in Cambodia and Vietnam. I was sleeping in a hotel room in Thailand when he woke me, exasperated. The relationship wasn’t working, he said. It wasn’t that I was sick.

“I’ll never measure up to your ex-husband,” he said. “You’re still in love with him.”

This was a surprise, and yet it wasn’t. I didn’t know that he knew me that well.

*

Western, modern medicine often doesn’t really know what to do with chronic Illnesses - the kinds that don't show up on medical tests. It, like the mental health system, operates in black and white. You either have something, or you don't. And even though, by some estimates, 45% of all GP appointments involve medically unexplained symptoms*, western modern medicine likes to have an answer for everything.

This is of course driven by consumer demand: we are categorising beings. It helps us make sense of the world and our experiences. It makes us feel in control. Yet getting a diagnosis for something like myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome, more commonly known as ME/CFS) isn't always helpful. There is no verified cause. They don't really know why incidents of it are skyrocketing or why more women get it than men. There are no approved treatments. For many there is no management or recovery.

While there has been promising research into the potential physiological causes of ME/CFS: inflammatory blood proteins, genetics, infections such as glandular fever and gastrointestinal illnesses, another avenue ripe for further exploration is psychological. While research has shown it is not a psychiatric illness, there may be a link between experiencing psychological trauma and the onset of ME/CFS.

Just as pain in the mind is a signal, so too is pain in the body. What if these illnesses are alarm bells, canaries in the mine that alert you to the fact that something is wrong? What if pain has a purpose? What if it's trying to protect you? What if pain is the container for everything you don’t acknowledge?

*

Seven months after getting sick, I drove three hours south to a converted dairy shed on a farm. It was the heart of winter and everything hurt. The couple who owned the dairy shed came by each afternoon to light the fire and leave me food: fresh baked bread, macadamia slice. They must have known.

I wrote in my journal for the first time in a year; shyly at first, as if meeting a stranger. I curled up on the old sinking sofa and layered my aching bones in blankets. Watched the rain trace patterns down the windows. Sometimes I would sit out on the porch and watch the grazing cows dotted on the landscape, oblivious to my presence. The land was green and fertile and soft.

One evening, I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose.”

Lying in bed, her words danced behind my eyelids like the rain on the roof. I woke much later in excruciating pain. My leg had locked in a bent knee position; I couldn’t move it. Rivers of cramps ascended and descended the length of my leg. I lay there for what seemed like hours. My eyes were blind. Night is more night in the country, and soon all that remained was the staccato crash of my heartbeat. The only thing in the world. I focused on my breathing. My heartbeat slowed. Silently one single word beat a dark rhythm to the sound of my heart.

Pain.

Pain.

Pain.

There wasn’t anything else.

And some hidden part of me was found.

I remembered the rest of Cheryl’s quote.

“Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

It didn’t happen right away.

But it did happen. The knots unfurled. The patterns of mouth ulcers lessened, and then disappeared. My joints shrunk to their original size, the weight fell off, my mind cleared.

No one could explain it, not in ways that made sense to the doctors.

I drove south with my dogs for a job by the coast. In some ways I started again, but in other ways I didn’t. I carried thoughts of the sickness with me, an invisible shadow hanging over my head. The memory of it would return at the best moments: when drinking in the sunshine, laughing with friends, swimming with the dogs in the ocean.

When you’ve had your soul shattered, whether it be by heartbreak or illness, you can’t forget, even if you want to. It never really goes away. This gift of remembrance is as painful as it is beautiful, a reminder to hold your broken parts close. They can transform you, if you let them.

It took longer to heal from the pain of my divorce. In some ways, I never did. When people talk about divorce, they speak about moving on. “I got over them,” they say. “I fell out of love.”

I will never get over him.

I will never fall out of love.

What I have gotten over is this idea that life happens between beginnings and endings. Getting sick taught me that life isn’t that simple. It’s messy, and it’s hard. There are rarely easy answers. Peace is a project that takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and, sometimes, a lot of pain.

But it is possible to embrace the contradiction that you can love someone without wanting to be with them. To feel regret, without wanting things to be any different. And to appreciate love, in all its heart-breaking glory, despite (or perhaps, because of) the life-changing pain that it brings.