It is too much—too pseudo-psychological and self-serving—to say that I manufactured my illness in order to become a writer. At the time I certainly felt the opposite was true, that being unwell was a hindrance to the writer I might become. With hindsight, however, it is also possible to see how I was helped. Like Proust’s asthma, ME/CFS has long been associated with languid malingering, typical of the privileged, the educated and leisured class who could afford to be ill. Regardless of its precise pathology or psychopathology—and I certainly rejected any mental aspect to it at the time—the range of symptoms, the lack of a straightforward diagnostic test or single effective treatment, the cycle of good and bad periods, its disputed nature, all make it curiously adaptive to the sufferer’s own psychological maneuvers. Dillon quotes Proust’s biographer Ronald Hayman: “It becomes hard to locate the hairline crack between the unavoidable and the theatrical.”
