Because it’s called “research,” I constantly feel the oppressive shadow of the Ivory Tower: Western, masculine, rational and orderly, demanding I leave my body and its (feminine, chaotic, threatening) intuition behind if I intend to progress further (Detienne & Vernant, 1974; Wilkinson, 1997; Metta, 2015). But the novelistic attitude and narrative inquiry exist on the same plane as ethnography. The use of fictional tactics like narrative plot, composite characters, and theoretical fiction are less alien to social science than (I think) I’ve been conditioned to think (Ellis, 2004; Gibbs, 2005; Spry, 2011; Smith, 2013). Footnotes and other radical citation forms abound in the writing of authors like Carolyn Ellis, Art Bochner, Anna Gibbs, Phil Smith, Aliza Kolker, etc., all of whom seem to recognize that parentheticals interrupt the narrative experience. The line that keeps recurring in my head is, Artistic integrity is a problem for you, but why does “research” mean I have to resist, or edit, or denigrate the forms that emerge as most effective for any project in question? Like Tanya Wilkinson (1997), who recovers her gut epistemology through dream analysis, I find myself asking all the time, Why can’t I bring my sick woman’s body and its particular brand of metis back?

In recent days I’ve tried. Through intimate photographs of reading and writing setups designed to get me through the “bad days.” Acupuncture treatments that look torturous but offer me an hour of pure, all-neurons-firing clarity. Transcranial direct stimulation, which is what I’ve been driven to as a last-ditch effort to manage fibromyalgia while pursuing this Ph.D. Audio recording of a panic attack brought on by reading the physicians’ notes from my appendectomy two years ago. In the time I’ve spent this summer reading and experimenting with writing and gathering materials for this project, I’ve learned things about my body I should have already known. I’ve learned that I am consistently well-appearing, well-nourished, well-developed, in no acute distress, regardless of my complaint. I waited 24 hours for that appendectomy, after living for months with perforation and 3 weeks post-rupture, because almost every physician I saw along the way saw what they wanted to see, and allowed that to trump any other form of sensory information.

All of this, I’m sure, informed the dream I had last night, which I had the presence of mind to log in my bullet journal this morning as free-form, stream-of-consciousness writing (though as I look at the draft, I left out a lot: its nightmarish fluorescence, the gritty tile, that I bumped every corner I rounded until my shoulder was a verdant garden of bruises, that the air was rough and sterile like a plane in takeoff, that I could tell from the places my scalp hurt how my brain would betray me during my defense: T3, T4, attention and insight. How even in the dream I knew how much it was wishful thinking that I could gloss over how painful this research process is, how tired I am of struggling to survive, and just be done. But that’s just the chorus of my chronic pain. When can I just be done.)

I post the dream log here because it feels raw and intimate and embarrassing, and I need to increase my comfort with being publicly creative, multimodal, and bodied in “research” the way I am with creative writing. With my experimental field notes. With what counts as evidence or a narrative to be analyzed. With my novelistic attitude that readers are able to locate the common in the profound and resonant insights of autoethnography and autoethnographic fiction (Ellis, 2004). With the fact that it is at least partly directed towards a community unused to seeing this work under the aegis of “scholarly research.”

I don’t think there is a linear, rational, orderly way of understanding the experience of analyzing chronic pain, let alone living with it. I suppose this is the gauntlet, in one facet of a prismatic form of interpretation, that I’m planning to throw down.

* Dream Log Transcript

Note: Paragraphed for readability.

I remember thinking at 4am when I woke from it, groggy, to go the bathroom, I should write this down, but I didn’t. What’s left are image scraps saturated with anxiety and impending doom. The dissertation was in my hands. I was in SC&I, on the third floor, which had lost all its doors. My advisor was tailing me, or I was in search of him; either way, in constant motion, we could never actually meet. The dissertation was complete, a thick, hard-bound book with pages made of different types of paper. The cover was somehow tactile. I don’t remember how. I may have been defending, or seeking my defense. This lostness, this search, may itself have been part of the defense. I wore layers I kept peeling off until my full back showed, my scarifications that GYN called “carved images of ‘working tools’” showed. I had audio in the background that grew increasingly louder, first the short, sharp, heaving breaths of the panic attack I had on 8/18, exactly one month before the anniversary of my appendectomy experience, then the sobbing laid over it, then the choked attempts to formulate the words printed for me under “clinical notes”: patient cries easily. Carved images. PID confirmed; patient denies sexual intercourse with men. Repeatedly insists she has not had genital contact. Patient looks well-nourished, well-developed, in no acute distress. Triage level 3. I hadn’t eaten in 3 weeks and had lost almost 10 lbs in that time.

I am in the room where this audio is playing and everything is dark, panic gives me tunnel vision. Is it real or performance now? I lie down on the floor, on my back, pull my knees in, roll side to side like I’m working my low back, my ass out in front of all these academics. I may be crying. I can see Susan’s face clearly in this dream. I say, it shouldn’t feel like I had to do this dangerous work alone. Then I am standing. I have a script. I ask Susan to join me “on stage” to play herself, and she does. Like Oleanna, the stage rotates to show relational power, how it changes, how hard it is to take it back.

I play doctor to Sara, reading aloud the private notes I write about her. She plays doctor to me. Or no, that’s wrong, that’s my safe envisioning of it. It’s Jack who plays doctor, or a dean, Karen, Jonathan, someone who academically parallels the medical expertise that positions itself as most legitimate judge of what my bodymind can do. The dissertation is in my hands and it is thick cardstock and corrugated paper, and it gives you instructions on how to read and write like me. Listen to my internal voice of pain with external horror movie screams. Ergonomic setups above and beyond. All the physical supports to fill the void of emotional support I don’t expect my committee to give me. In the performance I’m screaming and it’s so easy to cross from pain to orgasm, the same vocalization for me, the pleasure of making discomfort for once and finally being done.

I don’t think I painted for this, but there was an art installation of some kind, and audio of my breathing, and a looping video of myself transforming from pained, fatigued, gray to presentable academic. I try on different voices for my pain. I think there are two years’ worth of these journals on display, and voice recordings of myself and Mary, talking out our Gchats, and myself and my sister, verbalizing the texts I sent her from the ER while she was in Ghana an ocean away. So many people, academics and physicians, led me down this path, as did a culture hellbent on hiding its pain and eliminating the dysfunctional from the workforce, and still people tell me, “You were so stupid not to go to the hospital sooner.” I’m crying all the time, you know.

It’s not a gallery but there are photos with audio captions, of all my different writing setups, pillow formations on my bed, my cat warming my feet, my sofa setup, Mary and Sara’s sofa setup, a floating book caddy in an Epsom salt bath with me possibly in it, my desk and gel chair, everything within arm’s reach because I don’t have the energy. Acupuncture photos. Brain hacking. To show the extremes to which I’ve been driven to have the clarity and foresight to do this, more or less, on my own.

At the end of this long white hallway, which doesn’t exist at SC&I, my medical images, which are read differently by different people and myself. My own narrative arc is looking for an answer of any kind at all when there isn’t any, and narrative resolution is just the introduction of another possibility. Like ending with friendly fire in The Bang Bang Club. Ending with the thought of Chiari’s. Or the literal fusion of uterus to gut, a perversion of that Greek word used for Zeus putting Metis down into his belly, which also means womb. The idea that started this whole damn project, that Western masculine paradigms of medicine of the academic career, has forced me to lose my body for so long it took this forcible reminder, that I rely on feminine chaotic metis at the end of the day in everything I do, that I cannot just leave my body behind.

In this dream, I don’t think I pass my defense. I think someone else asks, “How is this research?” and I say, “How isn’t it?” I think someone tells me I’m just writing a novel about myself, and I have to explain narrative inquiry and the validity of truth-seeking on a continuous plane with ethnography. This is a performance that cracks open the problem of female pain and silence for everyone, not just me.

At the very end, when all I can see are waves of gray light like the ocular snow that precedes fainting, a man’s voice says, “This isn’t a dissertation. You have to write the dissertation before you can write the book.” I have a problem with integrity, I know. I do what the project demands. When I ask back, “Why?” the darkness is my only response.