Part I: Multiple Sclerosis, Childhood Sexual Abuse, and Artists’ Premonitions of Illness

The first sign I had of multiple sclerosis was a numbness in the middle toe of my left foot. I had been working for many hours in my studio on a hot day in August 2012—in flip-flops, climbing up and down a ladder, priming a large canvas, which it turns out I wouldn’t be able to paint on for almost two years. I was in my late fifties—late onset for multiple sclerosis—but very physically fit. When I returned home later that evening, after enjoying a long sultry night in my Bologna studio, I climbed into the shower (nimbly, I might add!) and began scrubbing off the white gesso from my elbows, fingers and toes—it was only then I noticed I had no feeling in my middle toe. My first thought was: Who cares?

I don’t think I mentioned it to my husband that night. I think it was the second night that I said something about it. I wasn’t alarmed, nor was he. He said something like: It’s probably those flip-flops you wear; they’re terrible for your feet. I wasn’t entirely convinced: Italians have peculiar attitudes about certain things regarding one’s health—like electric fans causing terrible illnesses, and not wearing slippers inside the house signifying disgustingly bad hygiene—but this particular suspicion seemed reasonable enough. The next day I worked in good sturdy, paint-splattered running shoes, but when I returned home and got in the shower, I noticed the numbness had spread to several other toes on my left foot. Within a week, in spite of my sturdy footwear, all the toes in my left foot were numb and the toes in my right foot were following the trend. By the end of the next week the numbness had spread to all the toes in both feet and up to my knees in both legs, and I had the very strange but unmistakable sensation that I was wearing extremely heavy steel-wool kneesocks—constantly … morning, noon and night. Now I thought: This is freaking me out!

Within a couple of weeks, I was a full-time resident of Bellaria Hospital, shuffling like a melancholic penguin down the hallways in my invisible steel-wool socks, numb from the navel down—except for my knees, strangely—with the distinct impression that my midsection (that is, my innards below my navel, including my genitals) belonged to someone else. It was horrifying, but weeks later, when, after massive doses of intravenous cortisone, I regained internal sensations in my groin, I have to admit I experienced an inexplicable sorrow: After decades of ambivalence and barely shrouded misery about my insides, I realized I had felt tremendous relief when my usual psychological disassociation from my insides (read: genitals) at last matched the physical sensation—they didn’t belong to me. I didn’t tell the neurologists that, nor my husband, but a number of months later I did tell the psychotherapist who began treating me.

How I came to be treated by this remarkable therapist, Dr. Stefano Boschi, is a rather incredible story in itself, but for now let me just say this: In 2009, I had completed a full-length audio play, The Diary of a Young Boat,  (intended as the sound component for an installation) in which a pubescent girl turns into a boat at puberty instead of a woman. It was a coded tale of incest, abuse, and transcendence, replete with graphic details of the girl’s bizarre metamorphosis. Many of those details—far too many to be coincidental—were manifested three years later in the symptoms of my multiple sclerosis. The coincidences were remarkable enough that when I described my MS symptoms and presented the text of The Diary of a Young Boat to Dr. Boschi—a psychotherapist and researcher, whose Inner Theater therapy addresses adult somatization of childhood trauma—he agreed to work with me as a special “test case” for his research.

 

As the Young Boat says: “I have a genius for getting sick. It’s my talent. My gift,” I believe that illness CAN be an act of primal self-expression and creativity—of course, not always, but sometimes. I realize I am treading on dangerous territory here and such a discussion requires extraordinary sensitivity and nuanced thinking. Not everyone who has multiple sclerosis has suffered childhood sexual abuse; not every artist’s works of fiction or images of violence or death are prescient of things to come (thank god), but certainly in my case there have been uncanny coincidences between my art work, childhood experiences, and adulthood health problems. My own experience vividly bears out the way early traumas become embedded in the unconscious and in every cell of one’s body, in ways that I truly believe others might benefit from hearing about. So, I would like to use my most recent virulent MS attack in October (2014) as a means to explore the relationship between childhood trauma and adult chronic illness, and the unique insight into such that an artist’s premonitions offers.

In the coming weeks I’m going to write about these things here, in tandem with a series of conversations with Sarah E. Kornfeld, a writer, curator, and longtime friend and supporter of my work. It is my hope that given Sarah Kornfeld’s unique talents and sensibilities, and her creative approaches to cyber technology, we can explore ways of presenting these interviews online, both in social networks and hopefully as the first series in the Theater in the Cloud section of this website.

 

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