Living with Adversity: Book Review
Adversity is part of the human condition. Our bodies are subject to mutation and decay and illness while our minds are prone to the terrors of depression, anxiety and psychosis. To be human is to be vulnerable to such hardships to varying degrees: sometimes it is sheer luck—genetic or otherwise—that we suffer less than the less fortunate. In this age of AI, it may be our frailty, and the limits imposed on us by our fallible bodies and minds, that mark us as different from the machines.
Living With Adversity - Eighteen Personal Accounts collects first-person testimonies of how people afflicted by illness, disability and less obvious forms of adversity like public shame and philosophical isolation, have faced their lot. It aims to “provide an insight into the adversities of others” while recognising that many forms of adversity remain hidden and are not immediately obvious when we meet someone. The book is different to works that come from the cancer or trauma survivor memoir genre because of the range of adversities covered: these 18 accounts cover a true panoply of suffering and expand our notion of what can count as a serious misfortune.
The volume is edited by the South African philosopher David Benatar. Human misery seems an apt topic for Benatar to explore given that many of his books and articles have argued that “life is so bad that it is always a serious harm to be brought into existence.”
Benatar’s brief to his contributors was to “convey to those not living with a condition what it is like to live with it.” They were asked to provide details of the hardships and challenges faced and their “methods of adaptation or coping mechanisms.” He says they were under “no obligation to be positive.”
The editor admits that, given that the vast majority of contributors are either academics or medical professionals, the result is bound to be “unrepresentative.” All the contributors are English speakers and almost all were able to access adequate medical or psychological care to help them cope with their condition.
Reading the various accounts, the key phrase to bear in mind is from the book’s title: each person “lives with” their adversity; it is not something that can be discarded at will but must be assumed and managed and, to an extent, tolerated, while life trundles on. One still has to work and lead a family life in spite of living under the heavy yoke of hardship.
Apart from the insight gained into different debilitating conditions, the book is valuable because of the picture that emerges of human strength and resilience. It is welcome to see that no contributor lapses into the empty platitudes of self-help when discussing how they faced the life-altering burdens of addiction, chronic illness and disfigurement.
One theme that emerges repeatedly is the importance of sharing one’s pain, of including one’s wider community of friends, family and fellow sufferers in the battle against these afflictions. In the first account, ‘Living With Addiction’ by Robert M. Kelly, a professor of philosophy, recovery is strongly linked to “feeling seen or, even better, understood.” He later expresses this as a “solidarity in suffering.”
Many contributors also stress the importance of not wallowing in self-absorption but, instead, directing one’s gaze outward, away from the pain and anguish and towards the world. Chapter two’s Anita C., a nurse who writes about being at significant genetic risk of developing Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) says she felt the need to be in control by engaging in caring duties and taking part in research. Solomon Benatar, the editor’s father, writes about living with diabetes and advocates “stoicism and an avoidance of excessive introspection.”
In many cases, what sufferers are after is not a complete return to normality—that innocent state they enjoyed before their condition started—but merely “the ability to function.” Any respite, if it comes at all, is always fragile, as Anna Reyksík (nom de plume of a woman with an eating disorder) notes when she says that recovery is not a “clear severing of ties” but a “daily negotiation.”
Another key question is whether one’s adversity comes to define who one is. The sufferer can be so caught up in cycles of treatment and hospital visits, or so altered by mental illness, for example, that her identity can seem to be entirely bound up with her condition. Adversity can even erase one’s individual character or sense of self.
The book recognises that it is both inappropriate and impossible to compare individual forms of adversity—no ranking of misery is possible but there is an awareness that, however awful one’s experience, there is someone, somewhere, who is battling something worse. It would be perverse to single out individual contributions for being more interesting, or more eloquent and insightful, and it strikes me as inappropriate to demand that some of these accounts be more poetic, however much we yearn to read about experiences that are memorably expressed—their candour is enough.
In one chapter, Associate Professor of philosophy Rebecca Tuvel, when writing about a “social media shitstorm” that resulted from a controversial academic paper she published, says that certain experiences in life teach you something that you simply could not have appreciated without having lived through the experience. For example, no amount of ‘book learning’ or theoretical knowledge about Parkinson’s would provide the knowledge of what it is like to actually suffer the disease. In the next chapter, Lynne Keeton, a retired anaesthesiologist who writes candidly about her daughter’s suicide, makes the same point vividly: “…you cannot imagine how it feels on so many levels until you walk in these shoes…” The accounts in this book help us get as close to these distressing but significant human experiences as we can without undergoing them ourselves.
Professionals in the medical and care sectors, families of those living with hardship, sufferers themselves and, indeed, anyone interested in the human condition will find a lot to learn from these brave accounts of adversity. For all its dismal detail, it’s a surprisingly uplifting book.
If you or anyone you know has been affected by the issues raised in this book under review and need support, visit GibSams: https://gibsams.gi/
