Dx: Diagnosis and Writing
some other register
too-narrow corridors
again
and muttered thanks
I am led into a space the white walls of which might at any moment become infinite
or absent
or a forest
​
​
perhaps this is what the story means
a miscommunication
​
​
and for the sake of some kind of clarity,
an artificial list
yes, she answered, smiling and with a decisive nod
something I should know full well
​
​
it’s a ghost story
but
sometimes they are painfully slow
impossible to hold
I held him above my hip
all the time
explaining
some strange kind of geometry, all folds and doubles and simultaneity
to my surprise, I continue to write
or
something close at least, altered, instantly and over time
spiralled, less socialised
not to collapse our experience
to hold our returns
my hands, holding him, were not my own
a banal expression of the obvious, a tangled-backwards-falling-mass
as I wade
slowly and persistently
vulnerable beyond belief
​
still,
there are
the currents and the softness of sand beneath moving water
I mean writing
I mean, some other register that we can no longer read
I wrote the view east
a bank of trees where the playground is,
a sharp seam of shadow and sunshine
moves up their bodies
you might cradle your infant and wonder how you were cradled
About the poem
In the years-long process of waiting (and pushing) for multiple diagnoses, for myself and for my son, I became aware that the need for a structure of understanding (a diagnosis) to help us know ourselves and each other, to help justify my choices, opened up another need - the need to find a way to live, for years, in the untethered, but always active, space of waiting. I needed a structure to contain the lack of structure, the uncertainty and endless-seeming deferral. Or, to find a way to make that waiting less urgent, to tell myself what I needed to know. Writing provided this containment, this holding that I needed in order to hold myself together against the waiting, the misdiagnosis, the sense of everything being provisional, tentative.
​
As a way of thinking about these needs/structures, I began working on the poem some other register in an attempt to excavate a different meaning from an essay text I wrote a few years ago on the themes of motherhood, neurodiversity, diagnostic spaces and writing. In putting the text through a process of erasure and re-structuring, my aim was to give these themes back the fluidity, ambivalence and uncertainty rightfully theirs (and mine) before I tamed them into an essay structure. I’m not unhappy with the original essay, as an essay, but I could sense something else beneath the text, something related to why I write at all. This project was a chance to lean into the fragmented, searching element of my writing practice, to which I am sometimes nervous to give free rein for fear of becoming incomprehensible when what I want to talk about is already difficult to articulate.
Image Credit: Jeremy Simon
About Anna Johnson
Anna Johnson is a writer, lecturer and mother who lives in East London. Anna is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Kingston University.
Their writing practice deals with the complexity and ambivalence of early motherhood and its intersections with (parent/child) neurodiversity and chronic illness (amongst many other things).
Anna’s PhD research focuses on the intersections of maternal studies, disability and illness writing, neurodiversity and queer theory. They explore the ways in which the language of the spectral offers one possible route to the expression of difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the strangeness of early motherhood.
Anna was co-organiser of the Visceral Bodies Symposium at Kingston University, April 2023, and is sometimes found running writing workshops. Anna is currently co-editing a special issue of Studies in the Maternal journal.
Recent publications include:
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But Also Flesh and Salt, The Contemporary Journal, 2022
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Failure: The Ghost and the Mother, Alluvium Journal, 2022
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Cascading Transitions: Becoming a Writer and Engaging with Neurodiversity in Response to Motherhood, chapter in Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders, Routledge, 2021
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An Intersection of Motherhood and Chronic Illness, chapter in Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine, Demeter Press, 2021
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Further details about Anna’s work and publications can be found at: