I have just finished reading Michael Rosen’s book Getting Better: Life lessons in going under; getting over it and getting through it. It is an extraordinary book, which I appreciated even more having heard Michael speak about it and give a reading from it at a wonderful community event at Stratford Old Town Hall at the end of June.
When I initially saw the sub-title about ‘life lessons’ I feared Michael might be laying down tips for living a better life – echoing the kind of ‘positivity’ mantra that follows the ‘always look on the bright side’ of life from people who you feel might have experienced very few dark sides. Michael does give ‘life tips’ in this book, but he does so in a way that is far from the false positivity and manufactured hope of some ‘self-help’ books. This is non-prescriptive writing, which always recognises that many of us are just not in a position economically, socially or psychologically to follow such advice.
This is a book that is rich with Michael’s own experience of illness, of grief, of feelings of failure and full of exploration about the ways he has been able to cope with his feelings and to live through and beyond them. Here are stories from Michael’s own childhood, his relationships with his parents, the ‘family secret’ of the dead brother that no-one talked about and of discovering the history of his family members in the Holocaust.
The book also describes Michael’s own experiences with illness and death – his 12 years of suffering undiagnosed with hypothyroidism, the death of his son Eddie when just nearly 19, and Michael’s subsequent experience of grief, and his own near-death experience with Covid – spending 40 days and nights in a coma at the start of the pandemic, being cared for by NHS nurses and doctors.
Resonances
Everyone will take their own unique ‘lessons’ from this book, and relate Michael’s life experiences to different areas of their own life. For me, the following three ‘lessons’ (if you want to call them that – I would prefer ‘resonances’ I think) felt particularly apt.
Firstly, Michael’s experience living with the undiagnosed symptoms of hypothyroidism struck a real chord of recognition with me. He spent 12 long years feeling like a ‘blob’, suffering a range of disparate symptoms from his underactive thyroid gland – including slurred speech, puffed up features, clammy skin, not being able to hold himself or walk properly or even to focus and think sharply. Once diagnosed, he felt a deep sadness at what had happened to him and his life as ‘my list of disconnected symptoms collapsed into one case: me.’ Once put on suitable drugs, it was as if he had come alive and yet he still had to reckon with what he might have done and who he could have been if he hadn’t been through those untreated years; life had been pre-Blob, Blob, and post-Blob. How could the strands of this life be knitted together, and was the person he had been and who he became all the Blob’s fault, or was that just a convenient excuse?
These feelings so resonated with me due to my own belated diagnosis of an illness of another endocrine gland, the pituitary. I spent around six years with an undiagnosed macro-prolactinoma, a benign tumour on the pituitary gland that caused excessive secretion of the hormone prolactin (usually only secreted to produce breast milk) and which eventually grew over my optic nerves, causing me to have tunnel and dimmed vision, so I could no longer see to read or go about my daily life. Like Michael, before diagnosis I suffered a range of disparate symptoms, which for me included gaining a huge amount of weight (without over-eating), experiencing severe and debilitating headaches, feeling extremely fatigued, losing all interest in sex, my periods becoming very irregular and then stopping altogether… and then the gradual loss of sight, which eventually led to me being rushed into hospital as an emergency, with doctors fearing permanent loss of my sight. Similarly to Michael, once I was diagnosed and treated I had to come to terms with so many areas of my life that had been altered by my illness, and to grapple with exactly what aspects of my life had been due to the tumour, what may have happened anyway, and had the tumour just been a convenient excuse for what I’ve perceived as so many failures in my life. This has remained a constant question for me, as although my sight returned many of the symptoms remained (plus some other ones caused by the drug I took to treat the tumour).
Secondly, I learned that I should use olive oil on my ingrowing toenails – a lesson taught to Michael by a podiatrist after his toenails (which had dropped off when he was in hospital with Covid) started growing back into his skin.
Writing through it
Thirdly, the way Michael explains how it has always helped him to feel better about his feelings and experiences if he writes about them really struck a chord with me. In his chapter, ‘Words’, he provides a wonderful exploration of just what words, and playing with words and sentences, can do for the person writing them – even if no-one else sees them. Writing can ‘objectivise experience’, it can provide distance or a different angle and perspective. ‘This kind of writing and thinking can take the edge off pain,’ he writes. ‘It can take us away from that desperate, nowhere-to-go, living-in-hell feeling and transport us for a while into something much calmer, cooler, more detached.’
I have often felt like this about writing. I do not mean the writing I do for public consumption or publication, nor the writing for academic essays or my PhD thesis – that kind of writing can be quite tortuous for me. I mean writing for myself – in the diaries and journals I have kept since I was 17 with their ‘stream of consciousness’ about aspects of my life. This would seem like meaningless drivel to an external reader, and sometimes does to myself on the few occasions I’ve re-read my journals. Rather what is important is the process of writing things down, of working things through in your mind, of somehow externalising it, which is what feels so valuable. I would urge anyone who wants to read about writing your way through difficult feelings, trauma and grief to take a look at Michael’s chapter.
Of course if you do share your writing with a friend or family member, or if you write for publication, there is something else going on too. As Michael writes, this makes writing different from just talking things through with someone – ‘you are sharing something you’ve unfolded on to a page, making it into a shape. It’s you, but in a way it’s not you, because now it’s out there, separate from you.’
I am profoundly grateful to Michael for putting his thoughts and emotions ‘out there’ so that we too can find our own meanings in his words and the ways they might resonate with our own lives.
Michael Rosen, Getting Better: life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it, (London, Ebury Press, 2023).