In my short story “Rocks and River,” ( Fall 2021 Intima) a young woman named Tran Huong Giang stands on the MacMillan University Bridge and looks into the ravine below. She knows—as does writer Meredith O’Brien in her essay “Another Game Day”(Fall 2021 Intima)—what it’s like to hear two voices.
For Giang, there’s the soothing river voice, and the critical rock voice. No one—not her classmates, not her doctor, especially not her mother—understands what it’s like to waver between them, and eventually the rock voice seems to get the upper hand. At least until a new doctor, one who avoids quelling the voices with pills, encourages them to flow, full force, into a well of curiosity and empathy.
That’s when Giang finds the confidence to risk genuine, healing intimacy, not the artificial closeness the app she’s designed—To You! — attempts to create.
In “Another Game Day,” O’Brien invites readers not just to witness, but also experience the internal chatter many with chronic illness hear only too often. “I try not to panic…,” she writes when her condition flares, just as she’s preparing to see her beloved Boston Red Sox play. “I try not to catastrophize …” “I have to work hard not to dwell on the things over which I have no control.” She articulates her own rock voice, the one tempting her to deny the truth: If she goes to the Red Sox game she’s been so looking forward to, the humid weather will likely exacerbate her symptoms.
Like Giang, O’Brien understands the need to assess risk then listen to and heed the more protective voice of wisdom, not the damn-the-torpedoes rock voice that might shout: What’s wrong with you? Don’t be a wimp. You can do it. But no matter how much she wants to go to the game, she knows the price she’ll pay if she does. She chooses reason over desire.
This is not to say she sacrifices hope. Only that her voice of wisdom has taught her to put herself—not her team, not anyone or anything else—first.
Before she finds an empathetic listener in Dr. Rashad, Giang writes poems about the voices she hears. The page understands her. But she keeps her poems to herself. O’Brien, however, allows readers to know her, and to know they are not alone in their experience of chronic illness—whether theirs, a loved one’s or a stranger’s. By affording readers the opportunity to engage with her, O’Brien gifts them—and, I hope, herself—with genuine, healing intimacy, the kind of closeness Giang knows an app can never hope to provide.
Again, like Giang, who chooses truth over illusion when she risks intimacy, O’Brien abdicates the illusion of control over the uncontrollable.
Marleen Pasch began writing about the challenges of navigating the healthcare system when she was an award-winning human resources communication consultant. After being diagnosed with an enigmatic, supposedly incurable illness, her own healthcare experience led her to practice and write about healing in body, mind and spirit. Her novel, At the End of the Storm, about a woman's psychological and spiritual journey to wholeness, received the gold medal in contemporary fiction in the 2021 Global Book Awards. Her next novel, Stars in Their Infancy, about healing possibilities when Western medicine teams with traditional treatments in Madagascar, will be released in late 2021. Select anthologies and journals feature her shorter fiction and creative non-fiction on health, healing and spirituality. Find out more about Pasch and her work at earthskyandspirit.com/