Jennifer Acker > Quotes

“More apt is convalescence: to gradually regain health after an illness especially throughout a period of rest or reduced activity”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“To recover is to restore to health. strength or consciousness; to restore to good or proper condition; to rescue from or out of state. But no notion of time is built into this definition.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“I did not want an untreatable illness whose origins and mechanisms were still mysterious.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Certainty exists for no one, but suffering from an unknown or little-understood illness is a contingent state in which the future is especially vexed. When is the future? Tomorrow? Three months? Three years? What will the future look like? Paradoxically, foolishly,I hoped it would look like the past. We would know we had progressed when we returned to the selves we once were.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“To embrace the freedom boredom brings - freedom to seize moments of beauty, to give space to curiosity and gratitude for rose bellied birds. glimpses of deer, cloud formations that quilt and thread and thicken The non-doing of simply observing helped keep my attention outward in neutral, rather than borrowing inwards, where I found fragility and dimness.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Being love-full was one way in which I was more than my frail body and mind. In which we were both more than our separate everyday selves. And for his own sake he needed to help me. To prove to himself he could adapt and change and learn to take care of me, even if it was terrifying and unfamiliar.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“To feel alive rather than caught in a downward spiral. But, for the most part, all I could manage were audiobooks,”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“When I fell ill, my self felt radically changed because so many of my planks were stripped away simultaneously. Not only my physical strength and energy, my ability to read and think complex thoughts, but also my sense of humour, my Jen-sensibility. Crucial emotional states like equanimity, optimism and compassion because contingent, a matter of circumstance, rather than a matter of me. As time passed, some force, unfathomable as the ocean, occasionally floated a plank back to me. I registered a pleasurable, painful twinge when the nail went in, rejoining it to my bones.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“I kept hoping that the next day I would wake up and the fatigue would have vanished, like a fever having broken. But in the morning, nothing had changed And I was terrified.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“But life does not conform to expectations.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Our conditions needed constant tending Our mutual vigilance, our active caretaking - these things were new. We had to work hard to learn them. We have had to change and adapt and discover in real time what it means to need each other intensely and routinely. To each suffer and struggle to support the other. It's not how we imagined our marriage And yet, over the past four years, this interdependence has become the aspect of our relationship we most cherish”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“A downpouring of immense darkness began . . . There was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“And I worried he would resent caring for me. I knew that illness was hard on marriages, and I wasn't confident ours could withstand the strain.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Convalescing forced limits, and therefore taught me to be less driven by fear of failure, in my own eyes and those of others”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“(...) Reading aloud is largely altruistic. The reader absorbs and enjoys only in fragments; the listener gains it all.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“The emotions of music are arguably more graspable than those of words - existing there on the surface for anyone with ears to absorb.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Fatigue, I learned, is not the absence of energy, just as sadness is not the absence of happiness. Fatigue is a force unto itself: it sucks you fry like a dentist's tool and punches you in the solar plexus. You lack reserves. You feel raw, unpeeled. Small barbs wound deeply: the self-pity adds up. The suffering of both loved ones and complete strangers strikes so much more deeply than before. But crying gives you a headache, so you try to avoid it. Sometimes you can't try hard enough and your voice cracks and you go to a dark, speechless place.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“I grew hopeless of ever learning what was wrong with me”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“I was driven, fed, and gently walked like a beloved, aged dog. The ruin and disaster I felt inside were incommunicable”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“Convalescence is learning to become kin not only with uncertainty but also with boredom, the frustration of non-doing”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue

“When a relationship deepend, it feels like the melting of a stream. Wider, more fluid, sounding of happy birbles. Our life together has an openness and receptivity absent from the middle years. We laugh more readily at our foibles; we don't hesitate to ask each other for help.”
― Jennifer Acker, Fatigue