Crashing

Intro: Crashing is an experience those of us with chronic illness find difficult to explain to our family and friends. It's an experience that seems to defy words. In this piece you’ll hear two poems and extracts from a conversation about what a crash feels like. These descriptions are as challenging as they are epic, and at time may be difficult to hear.

A final note is that you will hear the terms ‘crip’ and crip time - crip is a term reclaimed in disability culture and used to disrupt our understandings of disability and of so-called ‘normalcy’. Crip time points to disabled experiences of time.

Anna Starkey ‘Off and On again’

Crashing…. is falling through and out of time and space. It’s less of an object in motion crash and more of a computer staying still crash, silent and undramatic from the outside, but inside, intense unwellness of misfiring signals. Unrefreshing sleep, un-comfortable un-rest. A crash is a bit terrifying. What if you’ve lost a life’s work, what if you can never start up properly again?

But sometimes in a crash, you can find your way to the universe where crip time holds you differently, asks new questions, where we find who we are outside of capitalist ideas of productivity and work, and where crip space is kind and soft. But also, OK always, when I crash hard and for a long time, all I want is to fall back up, into spacetime lightness, and for someone to switch me off and on again.

Conversation extract

Fanny: “Time stands still. You can’t focus, you can’t - I can’t formulate words. I feel trapped, you know I’m stuck in a place and I want to move on.”

Hughie: “The erm, the sensation of time being internal rather than external is an important idea. Erm, and the continuously falling. The expression of weight and oppression together so it’s like, a feeling of being buried alive and a kind of impossible to resolve panic about being crushed, yeah? It occurred to me that the language ‘chronic fatigue’ is laughable.”

Fanny: “That’s also what happens when you go through a crash of any description, is it’s totally you, you know? Nobody else can understand it, it’s just you. And I think that the sharing the different ways it affects different people, it makes it a shared experience, yeah? You’re not alone.”

Justine: “Yeah but you feel it, it can feel very alone.”

Crash, Relapse, Collapse…

‘*In the Hall of the Monster King’

no-one thinks they’ll arrive here

stuck o’er years

studying over days

magnolia walls

the ceiling rose

the faux-glass lampshade

or the dust settling gently

yet relentlessly on the bedside,

the vase

the chest-of-drawers

or how dirt on windows

distanced the outside

blurring the sky,

trees,

clouds

the people on the footpath

& how rain can make you feel held,

comforted

or truly alone

how ones bedroom

is both

a nest

- a prison

& how sensitive you become

to light

to sound

to the pain of cat cries

& fox howls

red, her shrill-shrieks

he screams

grey-barks

or hearing the beat

of your own heart

da-dum da-dum

sinking heavy-boned

aching o’er days

on cotton

more weighted than a broken heart

legs ton-heavy

arms hung-limp

brain fogged

body rendered-unusable

unknown endings,

there’s such a thing as liveable deaths

sleep evaded her now

yet she night dreamt

of back-when she danced

chantraine,

contemporary to

‘opus 23 act ll

dressed in pink tights

imagine her surprise

when she felt herself child-light

air jumping

kinaesthesia

kinésphère

legato

but her children

had to witness her

fall, her

crashing

her friends

her grandchildren

sudden absences

o’er days

weeks, months, years

o’er & over.

* Edvard Grieg

Outro

This piece included On and Off Again by Anna Starkey and Crash, Relapse, Collapse by Justine McLaughlin. The conversation included the voices of Hughie Carroll, Fanny Eaton Hall and Justine McLaughlin.