[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_48

Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva, 2020

In my twenties, everyone around me went in and out of relationships like hamsters in a laboratory maze; it seemed there was nothing else for them other than an endless search for company. This didn't appeal much to me. I dreamed of infinite lovers and of passions as overwhelming as they were fleeting, but I also felt that I was missing something that everyone else had.

So I thought I would understand what it was if I acted like them.

I entered into my first “canonical” sentimental relationship at 25 just because I wanted to be in one. Myneed was not to love or be loved but to accept myself, making myself accepted by others.

My relationship with my first partner wasn't bad: We didn't hold hands or give each other chocolates for Valentine's Day. We were very good friends who could talk about anything and have memorable drunken moments together. There was a great spontaneity and complicity between the two of us, and, surprisingly, this gave me something new, something that I would call later “the three Cs”: comfort, consolation, and confirmation. But it was enough, at least not for me.

From the outside, we looked like a modern super couple: no cliché, no drama story, just tequila and boom boom. But from the inside, I soon began to feel unhappy, and I was ashamed of it.

I felt guilty in the same way an ungrateful person should feel guilty: how could I be unhappy? I was with a friendly, intelligent person who adored me and with whom I could talk frankly! The cause of my discontent must necessarily lie within me! I became sure that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was genetically unsuited for relationships. Or perhaps I wasn't capable of loving. Was this peculiarity that led me not to have long relationships? Not to fall in love? What doesn't make me feel like other people who live happily together?

What I was looking for and what I was being told I lacked led me to enter a relationship that bore the heavy name of "normality.”

I left my partner after a year, embracing the idea that I wasn't normal.

I chose relationships as an example of an outsider feeling because I think they may be the closest to the experiences of many.

Feeling wrong because you diverge from a binary Norm that is socially recognized is not a rare feeling. Everyone experiences it sooner or later because the Norm has infinite faces: heterosexuality, marriage, family, white skin color, the Christian religion, rationality, objectivity, science, health, stability, and well-being. The happiness of life as a couple and the magic of falling in love are just two.

Johanna Hedva, who followed and expanded the lessons of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattarì, writes: “Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and undoubtedly invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable […]. The body is defined by its vulnerability. […] The body continuously relies on infrastructures of support to endure, so we need to reshape the world around this fact[…]. It is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick”.

Every person is vulnerable simply because they are human. Suppose the system of power in which we are immersed has invented a Norm that divides us into "normal" and "abnormal," "healthy" and "sick," based on each person's vulnerability. In that case, we are all abnormal and all sick just because every one of us needs care.

There is no "right" way of being or "only" way to be; normality itself does not exist.

Reading Hedva’s text would have saved me a lot of the discomfort that has always accompanied me. Every time the thought of something wrong with me came, it was as if it knocked on the walls of my head, asking: “Knock knock, is the monster in the house?” And on the other side, in the shadow of the mind, a little me sat quietly, curled up, monster or not, pretending not to be at home.