The Body-Biography Connection

Who are we? What makes our lives what they are? These are some of the essential questions of our humanity. Some answers to this question place a lot of emphasis on free will and merit, that our lives are largely the result of our deliberate action and inherited talent. Other answers emphasize the social forces that come into play, like poverty and access to education, that shape our life chances. I had been heavily steeped in these sort of debates, but these conversations did little to prepare me for cancer. When we fall ill, there is no escaping the profound connection between our bodies and our biographies. Social scientists Anselm Strauss and Jennifer Corbin illustrated this body-biography connection in different illness scenarios: The dashed line represent an individual’s unfolding life story and the solid line represents the body’s path, both over time. The top diagram shows a chronic illness situation, with the body having its ups and downs, the biography dipping sometimes and holding steady others. The second diagram shows sudden catastrophic illness, with both the body and biography taking a drastic, irrecoverable dive. The last shows an acute illness and recovery, with the body and biography in sync. I have been thinking of what the picture of my body-biography would look like. I think I would need to have different color lines for the different subplots in my biography; some aspects of my life have recovered better than others. It’s that very disconnect that can make day-to-day life uncomfortable: my external body looks recovered (well, with my clothes on anyway), but my energy and psyche are not back to their baseline. This past week, my feeling of returning to my old biographical path got a boost. As many of you know, I am a professor. One of the great parts of my job is that I get to have a sabbatical now and again. I haven’t yet had one in my career, and had really looked forward to taking my family abroad for some stretch of time. Travel has always been a great learning experience for me, and I was excited to share that with my children. Things have fallen into place: my sabbatical request was granted, the visiting scholar fellowship came through, and we are off to Israel for a couple of months next Fall. There is still a lot to be worked out, but what a delightful disruption this will be. It has me hopeful that, someday, my biography will feel like it’s mine again, like I am authoring the story and not simply having to maintain a sense of myself in the face of the loss of illness. This is a big first step.    

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