I've been addicted recently to the Netflix TV series
She is from a comfortable background, is engaged to be married, but has
to serve a 15 month sentence in a woman's prison. The show is mainly about her
struggles to adapt, to fit in to this alien environment, and to come to terms
with her lack of freedom and her changed circumstances.
The show is brutal, realistic (I imagine), funny, compelling, and I
can't stop watching it. It also got me thinking about something that has
occurred to me on more than one occasion before. Having CFS is like being in
prison.
In episode 8 of the series, one inmate says to Piper, the main character,
"I feel like I'm missing so much." Me too, I felt like saying, me
too.
And I think that this is what inmates and PWMEs have most in common, we
are both simply trying to survive, while watching the rest of the world moving
on.
Like prison, of course, there are different levels of sentence. Some
people, like me, are on a day release, they can work in a limited fashion, have
some kind of contact with friends, travel to a limited extent, have a limited
form of freedom. We have a taste of the world outside without being able to
experience it fully.
Others, of course, don't even have that. They are in maximum security,
locked down for 23 hours a day, some in a form of solitary confinement, given
the exhaustion and difficulty even communicating with friends and family
causes. Their days are regimented and strictly limited by their disease, and
the outside world begins to seem very far away.
It is about freedom and control. Inmates in prison have lost their
freedom, and have little control over their lives. Our jailor is our chronic
condition that has deprived us of some of the basic liberties that most people
take for granted.
ME is a prison sentence. Our lives are constrained and constricted like
prisoners, squeezed until all some of us have left is a form of house arrest,
and no known release date. We are tunnelling, most of us, desperately looking
for a way out. There is no parole board, no time off for good behaviour. We try
to appeal our case, and it goes nowhere.
At least we can watch Netflix. Check out Orange
