Weave and Wait; Why Odysseus is Cool and All, but Penelope’s My Real Hero

I have a chronic illness.

Debilitating type of illness. Bedridden for years on end type of illness. Going to doctor after doctor and trying treatment after treatment and nothing ever works type of illness.

Because illness has been a little bit of a sore spot for me (just a teensy bit, you know), I haven’t been able to explore a lot about what chronic illness means for other people and learn what their stories are with it. In the depths of my own pit of despair, I could not bear to even glance at someone else’s pit. My pain was so big that I had no space left within me to hold space for other people, even if I knew that learning about their shared experiences might help me feel less alone. I hope one day to have that space in me again.

But all that to say; at this point in time, all that I know is my experience. And my experience with chronic illness has meant a lot of waiting.

Waiting for pills to kick in, and when they don’t, waiting for some other new treatment or diet to eventually make a difference. Sitting in hospital, ER, and doctor’s office waiting rooms, lying on the examination tables of every healthcare practitioner in the area, getting my blood taken so often that I learned to stop flinching and then waiting for the results to come back. Dipping into what I used to think was “woo-woo” to find some sort of relief (that rarely ever came.) All the while being mostly bedridden and completely exiled from my real life, unable to function even minimally. Waiting for it all to end. Waiting for the morning when I would wake up and not immediately be met with disappointment that I’m still in this torturous prison of a body without any choice or agency, living a life in which it felt like absolutely nothing made sense anymore.

It was a lot! It was a whole lot to be met with just as I was reaching adulthood —I developed the illness when I was 17, and relapsed hard at 20— and I really, truly felt like I could not even begin to find the words to describe the experience even partially.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t try to find them. I didn’t quite know why it mattered, to have words to describe or relate the experience, even just to myself. But the trying, I think, was, if not salvific, at least some hand to hold onto as I tried to navigate the darkness.

In short: when I got ill, I started writing. Furiously. The classic —and obviously, very profound— Notes App musings that are the rite of passage for any teenage girl. Mad scribbles in my physical journal. Poetry, from Dr. Seuss level rhymes to outpourings of lyrical free verse. Bucket loads of songs, when I could muster the strength to leave my bed and sit with my guitar. Sometimes it all felt rather hopeless, this Sisyphean grasping for adequate words or description which felt like, as I once put: “chasing after the ineffable with a pen and paper, hoping beyond hope that if I can say something intelligent about it then maybe it won’t have so much power over me.” As much as I chased after the ineffable, I couldn’t grasp it all; I couldn’t quite process it or break down something seemingly infinite into something manageable.

However, at the same time, I think writing down anything and everything I could was my only form of agency or defiance. I had no control over what was happening to my body and how it forced me to withdraw from my life. With no feeling of free will, nor access to what I had previously known to be Life —going places, doing things, talking, etc.— I started to feel as if I were drifting away, not quite real or human anymore. But in writing, in relating my experience to a book or a poem I’d read, or thinking of myself in terms of fairytales or myths, or crafting phrases that really struck at one small facet of this life-enveloping experience, I could weave little threads that somehow tethered me to this life, proving to myself that I was real, that I was still here. Even if, individually, every piece of meaning I could muster was a flimsy thread, perhaps if I could write enough of them and weave enough of them together, maybe they could form something substantial, some sort of lifeline or safety net; maybe, altogether, they could save me somehow.

So… speaking of weaving: enter Penelope of Ithaca, queen of my heart.

Though I have taken some Classics classes in college and at times have been on familiar terms with Homer, I have to admit that my understanding of Penelope is pretty rudimentary, Wikipedia stuff. She was the faithful and cunning wife of Odysseus who waited twenty years for his return from the Trojan war, twenty years during which she had to ward off many suitors who were pressuring her to marry one of them because they believed Odysseus had surely died. Her strategy: convince them that, yes, of course she would choose a new husband! Once she had woven the burial shroud for Odysseus’ father. Which took a very long time, incidentally, because while she would work on it every day, she would secretly undo part of the shroud during the night. She spent years weaving and unweaving, until finally her faith in Odysseus’ return was actualized and the two were reunited.

Penelope’s story stuck with me during my time of constant writing-to-try-to-make-sense-of-this-terrifying-universe (perhaps what I shall call my “Bedridden Renaissance”) for many reasons. The first time I identified with Penelope was in a short poem early in my relapse —it started in fall of 2021, I was 20— in which I described how, even though I was furiously writing each day, trying to “weave” meaning for myself during this hard time, any sense of Order or Comfort or Beauty I could muster would be unraveled during the night either in a wretched bout of insomnia or in hyper vivid, night-long nightmares:

Frantically trying to weave meaning each morning

As my tapestry comes undone in the night.

Penelope weaves and waits for her husband;

I weave and I wait to come back to life

A later reflection on writing-as-weaving (and the necessity of it for me during this dark time) came in a song I wrote called “The Archive.” In the weeks before I wrote this song, I was reflecting on this image I had of myself falling into a seemingly never-ending abyss, completely helpless, except for this —admittedly far more Spiderman-like than Penelope-like— ability to create threads and toss them toward the walls of the abyss where they could stick. Even though these weak threads might immediately break due to the force of my falling, I figured that, if I was able to continue throwing them at a rapid pace, eventually they might weave into more secure tethers and slow my fall, maybe even stop it.

Around the same time, I had read a quote from Nietzsche about how one should triumphantly throw roses into the abyss to thank the monsters who did not consume them, and I pondered: that’s amazing and all, Nietzsche, really, can’t wait for that moment, but what about when I’m being eaten alive in the abyss right now? I was then struck by my Spiderman-Penelope-abyss image. My tentative answer to my own question about what to do with suffering and struggle, in “The Archive”:

Give it a name, some kind of frame

to wrap around it all, put your monster in chains

Throw words into the black abyss

Then one day, when you’re out of it

You’ll see how tenderly they broke your fall;

Maybe you weren’t so helpless after all

Tentative answer, I say, because as strongly as I felt that writing was crucial to my survival, I also knew that I literally didn’t know anything at all, and I had no perspective from which to see the forest for the trees (or maybe the monsters for the abyss?). The end of the song acknowledges this, as well as identifies me with both Penelope and Odysseus, with both weaving to do and a sea of monsters to navigate:

A trope, a type, a phrase

They’re threads, so weave and wait

Forgive my didactic tone

I act like I think I know

I’m still in the dark, I’m afraid

But it helps to weave while I wait

A sea to cross all alone

And I’ve lost all I used to know

Words fail, but write them anyway

You might need them someday

That identification with both characters brought forth another wave of reflection. I thought about Penelope and how little power she had; she couldn’t take a ship and go out looking for Odysseus to bring his ass back home (though I personally feel that, if she had, The Odyssey would be a hell of a lot shorter). Instead, she had to wait. And yet, her weaving and waiting was, in a way, just as heroic as Odysseus’ treacherous journey home. She had her own decades of danger and loneliness, and her own particular sea of monsters (suitors) to navigate, that she braved it in her own way, biding her time and helping Odysseus in the only way she could by keeping Ithaca out of the wrong hands. Penelope, even if forced into a more “passive” position, was on her own odyssey.

That idea really resonated with me. Here I was, forced by my body to stay in bed. I couldn’t be like the stereotypical hero and, I don’t know, get out of bed and do literally anything. Save myself from the illness that my doctors were scratching their heads over. But just because I didn’t seem strong and active like Odysseus didn’t mean I wasn’t on my own treacherous journey; just because all I could do was weave and wait didn’t mean I wasn’t fighting for my life. Weaving and waiting was fighting for my life, it was me being strong and active, and making sure my healthy self had a body and a mind to come back to.

In the inevitable song that arose from these reflections, “Odyssey,” I had this image of my Bedridden-Renaissance-self weaving the very sea I would go out on to find my healthy self and reunite us. I was no longer stuck in my bed; I would sail on the billowing waves I had woven together out of my threads of meaning, venturing out until I found the version of myself that was lost and bring her back to me. This sea was my way home, and the sea I created would be safe and good and beautiful (the sea of monsters I navigate being already inside of me). Suddenly I am not a creature wasting away in bed, living in vain, passively being eaten alive by monsters. I am weaving and waiting, but I am also fighting my way back home, back to myself.

Cheesy? Maybe. But cheese (both literal and figurative) definitely wormed their way into my despairing little heart, and they come highly recommended from me if you are in the darkness looking for light.

My favorite lyrics from that song come at the end, when I sing to the healthy version of myself who seems to be gone and lost:

Meet me in the shallows

I’ll tell you, you were worth it all, and dear if you get cold

I’ll wrap my ocean ‘round your shoulders

I crossed it in the storm to find you

And we can tell the story when we’re older

We will get older

(In addition to cheese and also cliché, add, “writing to your past or future selves and saying things like you were worth it all” to my list of recommendations, especially if you want to heal your inner child or just, I don’t know, weep.)

The idea of wrapping “my ocean” around her shoulders, that this vast tapestry of words I created could not only be a vehicle of agency (getting out of this dark despair) but also a mode of comfort, and perhaps something to still cling to after this was all over as a reminder of where I had been and what I could overcome, meant a lot to me. Words and stories would get me through, and someday, this pain would all just be a story too.

In conclusion: Penelope is cool. Also, waiting is hard, and though there are some things in life that cannot seem to be made smaller or easier, I think writing about them can be a great place to start navigating them, even if only to validate to yourself what you are feeling. There are some things that feel absolutely meaningless, but we can still try to weave meaning for ourselves, even if it’s just reminding ourselves that we are alive and not alone by answering questions like:

• What is this like?

• What story does this experience make me think of?

• What metaphors speak to me and why?

• Does this remind me of something else I’ve gone through?

None of it made my symptoms go away, nor performed some sort of miraculous spring cleaning on my crusty, malfunctioning organs, nor substituted for good old fashioned therapy. But, I think, I was able to find ideas and hope to cling to, and to wield the little agency I had in throwing words into the abyss. I have always been a creative, but I firmly believe that one does not have to identify as a writer or poet or a songwriter to throw words into the abyss; even just writing mundane bullet points in my journal was helpful grounding, and often took the pressure off to create some sort of angsty beauty out of what felt utterly ugly and irredeemable. And now, a little removed from some of the worst times of my illness, I can find closure in a lot of what I wrote. I can provide some answers to that past version of me, crying out in the darkness for the current me, unable to put it all into words but fighting so hard to try, even if it felt as frustrating and useless as weaving a shroud every day and unraveling it every night.

In short: words fail, but write them anyway. You might need them someday.