By Clare Hickey

Read the essay here!

Clare Hickey: What was the moment you knew that Charles Darwin needed to be a part of this story? Were you familiar with him at all before?

Jodie Noel Vinson: Yeah, I love that you ask about the origins of this essay ’cause. I feel like it really became an exploration of origins. The essay really started with me in the early pandemic. Looking at, you know, this protester who was holding their sign sacrifice the week and kind of realizing I was one of the weak, maybe that they wanted to do away with and thinking, OK How did we get here? You know, and then kind of looking backwards and reflecting and Darwin’s story came into that. To kind of help me explore that question in my own life.

I really knew very little about Darwin’s life when I started the essay. He had been just this kind of iconic, almost stereotypical, even cartoonish, figure in my mind. And one thing I’ve learned in writing and researching, looking at the lives of of folks through the lens of illness, is that it kind of opens up kind of their humaneness and their vulnerabilities. It was really rewarding to learn about him in a more nuanced way. I think it was just really learning about the fact that someone who had studied and talked about and thought about survival of the fittest might himself be unfit. That kind of was the spark for the essay.

CH: What did your research process look like? Is there like a particular book that helped you a lot?

JV: I think I actually started with reading Voyage of the Beagle. It was a book I had in my shelf that I’d never read, and I was just so compelled by that travel narrative. Darwin’s just such a wonderful writer, such a curious person, and he really came alive for me as a character by reading that book. But at the same time I was reading a book that came out in the 70s about his illness by Ralph Colp called To Be An Invalid. He was drawing on Darwin’s diary of health and a lot of his correspondence. It was interesting to see parallels between the way that Darwin was describing the world around him and the way he tried to describe his health. I think also what was really helpful in researching the essays, a lot of his correspondence has been digitalized and made available on the Internet. So it was actually quite easy to then trace, something like a letter that I was interested in to the source.

CH: You’ve written several stories about long COVID? How has the reception been? Has it been what you’ve hoped for?

JV: I started writing almost immediately after falling ill in in early March 2020. Both my husband and I got sick and didn’t get better and, you know, at the time there was very little being written about this kind of prolonged experience. It was new for a lot of us and so I think what compelled me to write back then was really the sense of kind of like urgency and emergency. It was really a cry for help and recognition and advocacy, and there was so much denial at the time about COVID in general. But also it’s prolonged symptoms so at the time my motivation was a little bit different.

The response in general was really wonderful. It connected me to other people who are experiencing similar things, or who had in the past, and that was true of readers, but also about the the lives of people I was researching too. So it connected me in that time of isolation. Five years in now to the pandemic, things have changed a lot, so I’m writing now, maybe less for that recognition and more to reflect and explore the experience itself. With the sheer number of people who have experienced long COVID, there’s so much more recognition of it and much less, hopefully, gaslighting. It’s still important to talk about it. People will accept it more that as a reality, but it isn’t in our consciousness as much or in the media as much. That’s kind of the difficulty with chronic illness. It’s ongoing so we don’t engage with it.

CH: Yeah, I think it’s an inconvenient truth. That’s a a theme, I think of the story of the truth is often inconvenient, and Darwin’s views challenge religion. Long COVID challenges our perceptions of what we hope a pandemic ends up being is brief. Why do you think we are so afraid of being challenged?

JV: I think his theory really required people to accept something maybe very similar to what the pandemic forced us to look at. An uncomfortable truth about human life, about our vulnerability, about our mortality, and it seems like we, at least I can speak for myself. Especially in American culture we have this kind of defense mechanism that makes us want to look away from those uncomfortable or inconvenient truths. I wanted this essay to kind of challenge or breakthrough that, because there is a reward when we don’t look away. There’s beauty and life when we don’t put those defenses up.

CH: Towards the end of the essay, you say “there are vast swaths of hidden experience, more variations of lives left behind closed doors and on different planes”. Is there one of these lives you’ve interacted with that’s really struck you?

JV: Yeah, there have been a lot. When I fell ill it was like a whole layer of life was revealed to me, almost like putting on a new pair of glasses. People came out of the wood. A family member reached out who had been living with a chronic condition, undiagnosed for years. That person sent care packages and checked in and just had this depth of understanding that I hadn’t necessarily accessed or appreciated before. I became aware of this layer of life, the kind of invisible pain that a lot of people live with. These folks were the ones who were able to extend care and empathy and who knew how to hold up under the disbelief of others.

It was also the authors and artists that I began to research and study. I was reading contemporary writers like Susanna Clarke or Laura Hillenbrand. I was reading Seabiscuit and I was like, ‘Wow’, this attention to detail, and then I found out she was bedridden for years. I began to realize that there was a tie between creativity and artistic vision, and of the sensitivity and heightened observation that can can develop when when someone is challenged in certain ways. It was recognizing this kind of strength and resilience in the lives of people who had suffered in similar ways, the kind of creativity that could come out of an illness experience as well.

CH: Your essay is such a beautifully written acceptance of vulnerability and weakness as a natural thing, and a calling to recognize the value of humankind alongside our vulnerability. Through Trump, you demonstrate that aversion to this is a learned trait. Do you think that this aversion is reversible?

JV: I don’t know if it’s reversible in Trump’s case because he has a lot invested in this viewpoint. And to be clear, he’s twisted these theories to his own political ends. It’s social Darwinism, as I say in the essay that Herbert Spencer put forth, not Darwin’s, that I feel like is the lens that I’m looking at Trump’s through. So I think as as long as these viewpoints are keeping him in power, it may be difficult for him to reverse. However, for the rest of us, it’s not easy either.

I don’t think it’s a matter of flipping a switch and reversing our thinking. The illness experience that I’ve gone through gave me a lot of insight, and further reading and research strengthened this recognition. But, it’s an ongoing challenge for me to hold that perspective especially on a good day or when I’m feeling better. I want to remember the value and the richness of this experience on this side of life, and I don’t want to turn from the suffering of others. But that isn’t an easy way to live, right? I think I still have an impulse when someone tells me they’re ill to maybe doubt or disbelieve. I want to be able to recognize that defense mechanism and be better at kind of living with these hard truths because if I can learn to accept it in my own life, then I’ll have more of a capacity to accept and learn from and enjoy a fuller range of life of other lives, but it’s definitely an involving process.

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Jodi Vinson is a writer located in Rhode Island, where she serves as program director at a literary arts nonprofit. Her story ‘Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective’ ties together the life and struggles of Charles Darwin. Her experiences with COVID and a lack of empathy in the political sphere.

Clare Hickey is a NOR intern studying English Literature and Writing at Ohio University.