Dr Georgi Gill, IASH Public Engagement Fellow for 2025-26, has written a guest blog for the Binks Hub exploring her project Poems on my Mind: poetry writing groups for people living with neurological illness.
How we do we communicate our experiences of chronic illness to others? Not just the medical symptoms that we tell a doctor, but the cracks in our identity that a long term, potentially degenerative, illness can cause.
When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2003, I found it impossible to convey my lived experience to other people. My symptoms were invisible; I had – and still have – periods of brain fog, disrupted vision and overwhelming fatigue, but to everybody else I appear fine. For years I was isolated and had the overwhelming sense that I just wasn’t me anymore.
Eventually I turned to poetry, in an attempt to explore these peculiar sensations and emotions and later to communicate them to others. To my surprise, poetry worked. It worked better than prose. We expect prose to tell sensible narratives rooted in plot; novels and memoirs are structured in beginnings, middles and endings. Yet, peering at the page through blurry eyes and a foggy brain, I couldn’t say how MS would play out for me, and neither could my clearer-sighted doctors. Poems, however, dodged those expectations of knowledge and resolution. We may relate to a poem on a profound level sensually, emotionally and instinctually before we begin to understand what it might mean. I found it liberating to write into and through my MS experiences simply as an exploration in words to see what emerged. As time went on, I began to find a language to describe what I felt and how MS had shifted my relationship with the world around me.
You can read the full blog here.
For more about Dr Gill's work, see this post from October 2025.
Image credit: Fernando Lavin