The season of the sniffler

Dear reader,

It’s official: we’ve entered the season of the sniffler! You know, those irksome colleagues who show up to work with a packet of tissues and a long face. I should know: I’m one of them. From November to mid-April, I’ll typically go down with the flu, chronic fatigue, and one of those nagging little colds which drain me of all energy, but without providing the consolation of an all-out fever. Because at work, snifflers like us suffer above all from a lack of visibility sometimes tinged with guilt, as people start to raise eyebrows and ask us “but do you exercise?” or “do you eat enough vegetables?” Don’t blame us for the increase in sick leave which is keeping the government up at night: even when our symptoms are serious enough to make us go to the doctor, the result is generally disappointing. At most, we’re prescribed a box of magnesium which will slowly rot in the back of a cupboard.

Last spring, my condition just didn’t seem to improve, so I tried everything: consultations, blood tests, even a hormonal assessment, all in a vain attempt to switch from the common-cold team to that of noble anemics. In the waiting room, I remembered an anecdote told by the essayist Marina van Zuylen in the preface to her book In Praise of Tiny Virtues: as she left the office of a neurologist who had just told her (wrongly) that part of her brain was missing, she felt strangely relieved. “I was now the woman with half a brain who had heroically overcome her disability,” she writes. “And everything I had accomplished so far didn’t seem bad at all.” Behind the dark humour of the situation, we sense that all-too-human hope of being entitled to some laurels and a bit of peace. Unsurprisingly, my tests all came back normal.

It must be said that in addition to the social validation it brings, a solid diagnosis can feel oddly liberating. “Here I am with tuberculosis,” Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his Notebooks for an Ethics (1983). As soon as the disease is named, it seems to take on an aura of destiny. And what a relief! “I’m relieved of all responsibility regarding these possibilities that the course of the world has just taken away from me. This is what popular language calls being diminished.” But this moment of complacency is short lived, as the existentialist in him soon takes over: once he’s given the name of his illness, he accepts it as a mission, and considers it as nothing less than a “condition within which man is free again, and without excuses.”

‘In illness, pretence ceases’

—Virginia Woolf

But the characteristic of benign ailments is precisely that they’re not dignified with a diagnosis. Unlike the Sartrean tuberculosis patient, the seasonal sniffler doesn’t have the luxury of having their ills named, and thereby objectified by others. As the philosopher further writes of serious illnesses: “The new situation, although it came from outside, must be experienced, that is to say, accepted, in an overcoming.” It’s because it imposes itself from the outside as self-evident that the illness can be looked in the face and that we can position ourselves in relation to it, without identifying with it. The sniffler, on the other hand, is stuck with the reality of their own body’s weakness. Drowsy mornings, fatigue, migraines… Because they can’t be described as “real” illnesses, their symptoms never go beyond their subjective appreciation.

Deprived of the recognition of others, these prisoners of undramatic ailments also miss out on one of the other delights of real illnesses: anti-productivist subversion. Virginia Woolf defined illness as a challenging unveiling: “Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, […] it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” she writes in her essay On Being Ill (1930). “In health the genial pretence must be kept up and the effort renewed – to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work by day together and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe ceases. [...] Sunk deep among pillows in one chair, [...] we cease to be soldiers in the army o f the upright; we become deserters.”

Locked in their subjective perception, invisible to the national health insurance, the sniffler has no choice but to go work. Like a zombie stuck between two modes of reality, they continue to make their presence known in the world of “genial pretence” described by Woolf. A world deserted by the sick, but devoid of the energy of the truly healthy. To all my sniffling comrades, do not despair: for you too, one day, will fall well and truly  – and officially! – sick.

Apolline Guillot

Picture © Emmanuel Pierrot / Agence VU