[Last modified: November, 15 2024 01:16 PM]
I currently have chest infection, and I think it’s really interesting to think about experiencing the body in every space with a cough. When you do not have a cough, a stomach ache, a headache, or another illness or impairment, it’s easy to ignore how we feel, physically, in space. However, the moment you have to start attempting to repress a cough, you notice how many people are in a room, where the exit is, where you are seated. I often find myself, as a person with both anxiety and a chronic illness, choosing a seat closest to the door or an aisle seat in a lecture theater in case I need to leave a class for any reason. Thus, I begin to think about sick bodies or in some way non typical bodies and how they experience space. Specifically, I am analyzing the experience of being in class with a cough.
As I sat in my 2 hour seminar a couple weeks ago, I tried to calm my breathing from the 40 minute commute to class. Breathing in the cold air to my bronchitis-impaired lungs during the first 10 minutes and last 5 minutes of my journey from Hampstead to the IOE had only irritated me more and I started to feel the scratch at my lungs, my airways constrict, and my throat tickle. The more I tried not to cough, the worse it got until finally I was in a full-blown coughing fit, having to stumble out of class to catch my breath. As a chronically ill person, I often experience my body as unpredictable, untrustworthy, and extreme and these feelings are heightened when I am in a classroom with a small amount of people who can easily observe me. I fidget and attempt to distract myself between doodling and opening my laptop, picking at the skin around my nails and darting my eyes around the room. I think you can always find the anxious people and/or the people who are not feeling well twitching and moving whereas people who are feeling good and present in their bodies generally tend to be more still, in my experience. Sitting in class when I was getting sick made me experience temperature differently as well as other bodies, which I felt were much closer together and stifling compared to when I am feeling good. It got me thinking about how space, like a classroom, might seem an objective size or temperature but these are completely subjective experiences.