Fatigue, the 21st Century and a new kind of ‘I’ (with Anna Grear)

In this episode,  Anna Grear reflects on fatigue in relation to the 21st century's need for a new kind of 'I' apt for the complexity and challenge of the times. Weaving her own 'stark' journey from one kind of self to another in her own walk with ME/CFS, she suggests that those of us with fatigue simultaneously offer critique and hope to an exhausted world — that we are positioned to experience the emergent, complex 'I' now required if humans are to respond to the evolutionary shift underway in the pressurised present era.  

Transcript

FATIGUE FILES — Fatigue, the 21st Century and a new kind of ‘I’

Nothing quite challenges a Western sense of agency like a chronic health condition does. Nothing quite brings a person into the somatic field as a living shapeshifting experiential flux of what feels like dissipation at times. To face chronic fatigue is to face a new slippery new teacher of embodied life — a school of hard knocks in which the agentic powers of the body itself come to the fore as the teacher — much like the Zen master rapping the student on the shoulder with a stick. ‘Wake up’. And, in this case, I suggest, ‘wake down’.

It’s quite the journey, no? That journey from the Western mind-body split and all that it permits and demands in the way of as self-defeating ways of living and dying, to something else: a different sense of self — a different kind of ‘I’ or me.

My journey was a rather stark one. I was a true daughter of the British military: born in South Yemen in an active conflict zone. My father told me that on the first day in the open air beyond the membranous walls of my mother’s womb, I was fired upon by mortar rockets, welcomed (if that’s the word) into a world that my nervous system simply couldn’t handle at all. Like all infants, I relied upon the self-regulative capacities of my care-givers. So much for that. My birthplace, the British Protectorate of Aden as it was then known, was a post-colonial outpost of British Imperial ‘power over’. My father was the commander of a group of Arab Protectorate Levies, one highly driven and capable European man in the midst of those he was trained to rule, and had, apparently, to distrust. My mother — often just left alone with me — was almost permanently terrified. That was the case even in her late pregnancy out there in Aden. So, even before I emerged into that fiery desert day with its deafening rocket fire, I was already a hot mess: soaked through and through with my mother’s fear, her own constant state of fight-flight, her own jazzed and frozen nervous system.
            
As a child of the military, growing up, I became in many ways and senses a fully signed up daughter of Western power-over and the body-mind split. As a child, I had an imbibed sense of my own physical potency: I understood force, and physique, and athleticism better than most — more boy-like than girl-like according to the socio-sexual conventions of the time. And I thoroughly internalized ‘mind over matter’ —as a domineering rider, the one that drove the poor brute flesh around like some beast or some kind of robo-fleshy android servant. I was thoroughly schooled in the body-suppressing determinations that soldiers exercise. By my 30th year I was a consummate athlete, martial arts training three times a week, running, weight-training daily on a home gym — this despite being a mother. In fact, in my first pregnancy, I trained in physical theatre. In my second pregnancy, I continued to train in Kung Fu … until my own body exercised its own determined powers of wise agency.

I was, at the time, in a very difficult set of circumstances and commitments that locked up my aspirations in limiting patterns. Despite my Kung Fu practice, I was internally tied and bound by invisible bonds of broken inner strength and by a complex internal struggle to maintain a sense of agency. The paradoxes abounded — unsustainably.         

My father died at the height of these contradictions when I was 31 years old. Six months after his death, stressed beyond my capacity to resolve the contradictions and difficulties of that difficult time and by the psychological shards of grieving combined with older rage with my father, my body intervened. Decisively. 

And two years later, after far too much time alone in my bed in darkness and in my own psyche, visited by apparitions and bizarre sensations, torments and terrors, I was first diagnosed with ME/CFS. 

Of course, that is a vastly over-simplified account of a far more complex reality and there’s so much that I am skating over. 

The point of this reflection though, is to visit the emergence in that process of a very different sense of ‘I’ — a process of being thrust into the experience of being a very different kind of ‘I’. 

Almost immediately after first collapsing into the ME/CFS there was no longer a sense of a contained self driving a body, but something far more like a lost cognitive faculty losing its grip on the body it thought it controlled in so many ways. The unconscious mind, credited with producing 95-98% of all our behaviours, patterns and deeply embedded beliefs and layers, took control — but this was not control in any sense in which I had ever experienced or understood it. I became multitudes, dissipating, caught up in fight, flight and freeze and with my brain vomiting locked up traumas into awareness. Back then, even getting to the lavatory was an undertaking that saw me crawling along the floor there and back, and then into bed, exhausted by the effort, with a skin that simply didn’t seem to shelter me from the raw scraping of the world against my nervous system. I was open. A bare nervous system. It was terrifying. As were the spiritual emergences that seemed to co-emerge: movements of energy, strange visions, bursts of light, euphorias and terrors, knowings and unknowings, new sensory experiences, intense sufferings. I had no guide. I was naked on the waves of change without even understanding what that change meant or where I was headed. It felt as if I had been quite literally stopped in my tracks and forced to lie down.

Fast forward some 32 years later and things have moved on considerably. Hard psychotherapeutic self-encounter, deeper spiritual awakenings, years of meditation practice and an engagement with New Materialist thinking has brought me home to a deep sense of openness of an entirely different register. 

From being the military child of the mind-body split, I have come to embrace the lived, embodied realities of an emergent self and to feel at home with it.

This self is very far removed from the old Western will characterizing patterns of ‘power over’, so dominant in our present societies. This is a self complexly emergent in patterns of influx and efflux, a space of intensities and flows that both inhabit and exceed the bodily boundaries of skin and of human neurological sensing. This is a self experienced as layers and drifts — a body lived as multiplicities of dynamics. Think for a moment of the trillions of cellular communities and transcellular and intracellular communications between minute entities millions of years more ancient than your Sapien corporeality and marvel at your more-than-human, kaleidoscopic becoming. And this is biology. Simple biology. Your flesh is but one manifestation of a much, much longer, much deeper, much more invisible process. And it is that all the time. Even when you sleep.

As I sit with these patterns of ordinary beingness, opening to them consciously, I also know — for fact — that my psychological and affective being is similarly emergent — the result of thousands and thousands of unconscious programs taking the form of electromagnetic and chemical dances in my brain-body assemblage that make up my implicit memory and biological habituation. We are all in process all the time, literal circulations and flows. 

Fatigue is an incredible teacher. It demands profound returns to biological imperatives far older than the modern world. It simultaneously invites a deep encounter with insights emerging from cutting-edge health optimization science and even the new physics. Over time, I have become convinced that fatigue is a uniquely provocative message to the 21stcentury — a radical critique of unsustainable neoliberalism, of toxic social structures, of cheap, reductionist paradigms and yes, of the old counterproductive idea of the separated self whose mind defines it and whose body is merely part of the ‘world out there’. We have Descartes to thank for that, but not just him. 

Facing the complexities of the contemporary era, and the mess that old modes of thinking and action have generated, it is entirely clear to me that we need, us human creatures, a new sense of ‘I’ adequate to the challenges of these times. Those of us with fatigue are embodiments of both those critiques and those calls for new ways of self-knowing and self-experiencing.

Fatigue is a teacher of this historically urgent new sense of ‘I’. 

Those of us forced by fatigue into an altogether less simplistic relationship with the body-mind co-emergence can gain a different awareness of ourselves — an awareness of ourselves as emergent assemblages, made up of multiple more-than-human histories, collaborations, conflicts and evolutionary folds over deep time. 

The mind-matter split is thoroughly overturned by the realization, in neuroscience and beyond, that thought emerges as biology because what we think shape-shifts our emotional maps, hormones and neuro-transmitters: the mind-as-the-body is a highly sensitive, collective dynamic. And these patterns of becoming are recursive: neuro-transmitters and chemicals and multiple other more-than-human dynamics of the emergent self are, it turns out agents in their own right. They intensify the loop. They help co-produce a person.

And then, there’s the encounter with the ‘I’ that emerges from reflection in enforced stillness. Fatigue is great for enforcing stillness, after all. In that stillness, we can learn what meditation can teach: that that the little self we live as is an amalgam of habits, thoughts, interpretations and patterns of reactivity. In a deep sense, insubstantial, illusory, just a habituated series of trances. And some of us are forced by fatigue into a kind of ‘waking down’, and not just a ‘waking up’. We re-learn the body. We learn to welcome it as animality, and more. We can embrace our bodies as evolutive inter-dependent, light-sensitive, wave-forming kinds of emergent presence. This body is an assemblage  with clear needs and agentic dynamics that run the show behind the scenes, and much as we learn to understand it, and nervous system activation, and the role of deep trauma and more besides, we also learn, over time, to trust this complex assemblage of highly evolved intelligences.

This body, moreover, some of us discover, is also portal to worlds beyond and beneath — a portal into experiences of reality far beyond the limited stories we contemporary consumers are taught to accept as our own. In fact, fatigue as a critical agent teaches us that spirituality itself is far more than a consumer trend — far more than experiences and states. Waking up means awakening to the patterns of self-destruction mediated by structures, as well as by our own personal reality tunnels and trances. The layers of all this becoming are complex. The dance between choices and biology, between perception and world, between thought and the material agencies of the multiple communities of which we are made up are complex and open. This openness is both constrained and exceeded by the trillions of more-than-human co-minglings that we inhabit and are. 

The lesson here is twofold. First, humility: there is so much more intelligence expressing itself in uncountable ways in an intelligent universe. Secondly, trust. We are the result of billions of years of cosmic and planetary, geological, biological and social evolution. We are the results of some kind of profound and ongoing generosity — and we have so much to learn from it. And there’s so much more to say and explore, of course. So much.

But let’s finish here: the kind of ‘I’ that the world now needs — in an an age when technology, human agency and planetary crisis energies converge in menacing signs of potential species extinction — the kind of ‘I’ demanded is an ‘I’ experienced as a profound, open awareness deeply at home with its own emergent complexity. Let me repeat that: the kind of ‘I’ we need is an ‘I’ experienced as a profound, open awareness deeply at home with its own complexity. 

And fatigue, if nothing else, can be an expert teacher of this. We can learn ways of embracing the lived experience of our own, more-than-human emergence and entanglement with multiple others of all kind, seen and unseen. We can learn to understand and be at home with the layers of evolving dynamics that make up a human self. We learn in multiple ways: Health optimization science; spiritual practice; psychotherapeutic insight; body-mind healing modalities; hypnotic explorations; the new physics; the new biology; and more. These are all ways of working with allowing this emergent ‘I’ to dance us through the challenges of our times, both individual and collective.

So, here's to layered, open selves. Here’s to humility. Here’s to trust.

Here’s to stepping out into the river of the world as watery eddies in motion, swirls of becoming as dynamics indynamics. Here’s to fatigue as a powerful portal to ways of waking down and waking up in response to the deep need for awakening and transformation in a world — and a planet — driven to exhaustion. 

So, finally, here’s to all of you — and to your waking down and up, wherever you are on the journey. The world needs you, now more than ever, to embrace a new sense of ‘I’ and to support, by so-doing, the evolutionary unfolding taking place in our time.