Abby Caplin

Tikkun author Dr. Abby Caplin sent me a link to her new blog, Permission to Heal, a while back but I haven’t managed to take a look until now. I found it a sweet read. She started off by saying:

Welcome! This blog is for people living with chronic illness, who might be up in the middle of the night, or down in the middle of the day. I hope this blog will give you hope, ideas and confidence so you can start to feel better soon!

I don’t have chronic illness but I found a good deal of what she wrote was relevant to just living with the chronic condition of being a human. Several of her posts were about giving yourself permission to do things like read a trashy novel that absorbs you totally (and gives your body time to rest), go to the movies alone, or just write. These are the things I have always done when I am down or exhausted or lacking in inspiration or clarity. People need permission to do these things?, I wondered, reading her blog. But of course it is true. We do need permission, especially in American middle class college-educated culture with its injunctions to work hard and read things of literary worth, and be sociable. It’s likely our own inner censorious voices that we have to ask permission of.

My grandfather was a famous Christian socialist minister, author of dozens of books and owner of a fine library, but it was the 20 or more Perry Mason novels in a row on one shelf that I guess gave me permission to read murder mysteries without knowing I had the permission. Writing the truth of my life in cheap notebooks was something I discovered at college that saved my sanity.

If you need your own or a doctor’s permission, read Abby’s website. She is also someone who has lived for 25 years herself with chronic illness (Crohn’s disease), so she knows from the inside what she is talking about, as well from a doc’s perspective.

I was especially happy to read this:

If you can say or write the truth of your life, you help influence and improve your immune system.

She says she can send the scientific studies to back this up if you need them. I’m delighted to hear such studies exist but I don’t need them to convince me. In my early twenties I suffered from weeklong neck-tension headaches from too much deskwork that discouraged me from going for an academic or office-based career, and I spent a year in and out of hospitals with undiagnosed intestinal illness, and was afraid I was going to become someone with chronic ill health. But in many ways I did write myself back to health, because that became my way of making sense in the midst of the confusion of my life.