Scarlett Curtis: Silver linings

Long-term illness gave me experience of self-isolation before Covid-19 arrived. Here's what I learned. 

‘We’ve been here before, haven’t we?’ That was the phrase spinning around my head as the world went on lockdown and millions of people embarked on a mission to stay at home. I have been here before. I got sick when I was 14 and spent the next six years 'sheltering in place’, only leaving the house for the occasional doctor’s appointment or walk around my block.

No one knows what to say to a child who is sick. You can’t ask them what they’ve been up to lately because the answer is ‘nothing’. You can’t chat about the weather because they haven’t left the house. In lieu of conversation starters, people tend to give things to sick children. They give you cake, frozen meals, Haribo and sewing kits. More than anything, they give you silver linings.

Human beings possess a deep need to find silver linings and we search for them even in the darkest of places. We want those who are suffering to learn from their suffering and to come out the other end with wisdom and utterings of ‘if I had my time again, I wouldn’t change a thing’.

As the years of my illness dragged on, the silver linings thrust upon me grew more and more extreme. I was told that the pain would make me stronger, that the years of torture would make me invincible. I was told that it would make me kinder, that all this suffering would give me a perspective on the world that few others possessed. I was told that it would make me happier, that the knowledge of this darkness would make the lightness even brighter. I was told to be grateful; that things could be worse. I was told to have no regrets.

After six years of illness I began to emerge back into the real world and I waited in tense anticipation for my silver linings to appear. I had been promised strength, empathy, resolve and Mother Teresa-like healing qualities. As the pain in my body finally started to heal, I keenly prepared for the arrival of my well-earned moral virtues.

I was promised silver linings and the silver linings never arrived. In fact, the more time I spent having them put upon me, the more I began to realize that the purpose they served was to comfort those who gave them out. People aren’t very good at looking pain and suffering in the eye. We dance around its edges, blurring its impact with heart-warming tales. We shower darkness with metallic paint in the hope that its silver edges might just shine through. We run around in circles, exhausting ourselves just to stop ourselves from ever sitting down with the bad bits of life and talking to them directly.

We’re going through a bad bit right now, a way of life I feel all too familiar with except this time I’m not alone. There is a collective cry, across the globe, for silver linings. We are searching in the dark for an upside; perhaps this is the time to finish knitting that jumper? To write some poetry? To read War and Peace? To bake banana bread?

We are longing to make this all mean something but looking back, my pain didn’t really mean anything. My pain didn’t make me who I am today, but surviving it did. Getting sick and staying sick was the worst thing that ever happened to me and my family. When that magic, hypothetical fairy comes to visit and gives me the option of going back and erasing it from history, I will take it. No one needs to go through what I went through and despite popular opinion that ‘everything happens for a reason’, I don’t believe there is a reason when a child is sick or when a human is suffering.

This would be a very bad essay if it ended here so I shall give you this. I shall give you this one, tiny, life lesson. What I learnt from my pain is that there are no silver linings. I learnt that the only way to deal with suffering is to look at it directly and diminish its power by the sheer force and will of the light that’s inside you. The pain doesn’t teach you anything but you teach the pain. You teach the pain that it will not destroy you. You teach the world that a soul cannot be crushed by suffering, no matter how much it might feel like it at the time.

What this moment in history is revealing about us is what those of us who’ve suffered have known for a long time; that the true silver lining of any kind of darkness is the fact that you survive it. What we will learn is that we can get through hard things and emerge on the other side; bruised and battered but not fully broken. And next time someone is suffering, the next time the world turns black, we will hold their hand and we will sit in the darkness and we will not let go until the lights finally come back on.