Vertigo (Imagining Ménière’s Disease)

It started for me one night in 2013, with no warning. Meniere's is a debilitating chronic condition, charaterized by an irreversible loss of hearing, tinnitus, vertigo attacks that can throw you on the floor, and multiple physical and cognitive side manifestations of variable intensity . The vertigo crisis may happen in series, triggered by many possible factors (light, noise, warmth etc..). Their unpredictibility, and the fact that even familiar environments become aggressive generate a recurring anxiety, and impose radical changes in the way of life. The anxiety is amplified by the absence of perspectives as there is no known cure nor effective medicine, and by the fact that no one really understands what’s going for you. Depression,  social isolation and a high sense of aloness are common consequences. Violence and absurdity shift from the existential realm to that of intimacy.
Sight plays a crucial role in the disease, as many sensations are above all visual: variations in the field of vision and a loss of focus that cause disorientation; the vertigo triggers a feeling of being visually attacked, followed by a struggle, with the attempt to regain balance and self-control, all through images perceived and transmitted to the brain, the stabilizing organ. Only absolute darkness and silence bring relief.
In this series, I try to reconstruct what I perceive to share it, and perhaps to find meaning in it.



I
Banged in the face of the mirror
 Crushed by the dazzling speed of time
 Disappeared




I'm deaf 
And I'm trying to listen to life
 It's screaming too loud 
Probably
For me to really hear it





(All the poems translated from French by the Author)





Passages