Think back to this woman who, session after session, tirelessly repeated: “Every day, I get up with the impression of having a dead elephant on my back. The image had its effect, letting me feel with it what it was about the heaviness of living. I also remember the image, offered by this young man whom I was accompanying, of a half-inflated balloon in the morning, then which, from hour to hour, was losing its air by dozens of micro- incisions that he could neither properly identify nor seal. I myself have a ton of images to try to designate her, from my long experience of working alongside her, of letting her starve my days before I surrender to her: my fatigue.
Images, especially those that we manage to cast on fragments of our pain, always give us access to a much denser world than the one that our modern era stubbornly designates by means of this “medico-economic newspeak” according to the expression of the psychoanalyst and philosopher Roland Gori. Major depressive episode, adjustment disorder, non-functionality, work stoppage and other generic names become, when you really listen to them, valleys, hollows of waves or deserts, dark corridors and other shrinkings of the soul.
So, sometimes, when we tolerate white noise, the “empty pages”, as Marie Cardinal said, at the turn of the dark, a tint of color emerges, that of an intimate word to be born, which we will have to accompany as a midwife would: with patience and trust.
November seems to be mistaken for May, with its 21 degrees in Montreal in the middle of Saturday, reminding us at the same time of the concreteness of an end of the world on the horizon. Nevertheless, the hour goes back and, inevitably, we spin towards the darkness, the coldness and the bareness of the trees which, sometimes, echo our own cold rooms and other internal cracks. If, as the essayist and publisher Mathieu Bélisle said during his visit to Sherbrooke, it would be interesting for us Quebecers to stop having “depressive winters”, the fact remains that the voicemail boxes of shrinks are overflowing from November to February, and have been since well before the current shortage.
It is moreover on the 10th of this same month that the very appropriate On the run. An exploration of our ordinary fatigues by the essayist and philosophy teacher at Cégep de Sherbrooke, Véronique Grenier. With an intelligence and a breath that we recognize as much in the author as in the “Documents” collection of the Atelier 10 house, she deals with our contemporary exhaustions.
Reading it made me want to invite you not only to do the same, but also, of course, to write to me about your fatigue. Are they, as Véronique would call it, those who have lived with you since childhood, “forging [en vous] paths leaving you with the impression that they are the ones that now flow in [vos] veins much more than blood”?
Or would you be able to classify them, as the book dares to do, with a benevolent look, without ever falling into complacency? There would thus be various fatigues: that of everyday life, of information, of parenthood, of the struggle or, even the hardest to say, perhaps, that of being oneself.
“There is no need here to remind me that my grandmother got up at 4 a.m. to bake bread and that she washed the clothes of the 12 children by hand while my grandfather went to chop wood to keep the fire burning in the stove”. Historical comparisons are often risky unless we can really establish them with accuracy and show the relevance of equivalences, which is not given to everyone. Each era has its difficulties and challenges. And ours is indeed tired. »
“Yes, Véronique”, whom I finally got on the line after, ironically, when we both came up against the ramparts of our overbooked diaries, “you dared, in 82 pages, to throw on our exhaustions a rare conceptual and empathetic amplitude. We put down the book a little less tired, suddenly, as if the fact of having been understood, too, released a little vital energy in us”.
“That’s what I wanted,” says the one who, from the start of the book, announces that she will leave the question that interests her the most in suspense: “But what do we do with our exhaustion? Through what window can we squeal them? »
With these delicious formulas that belong only to her, she leads us to throw a powerful and soft beam of light at the same time on our more or less assumed desires to “slide on the existence of others” (scroller) for hours. , to throw ourselves into the whirlwind of action so as not to inhabit either absence or emptiness, or even that of passing from a “vertical” concentration to an increasingly horizontal concentration.
“I wanted to try to turn around our fatigues by legitimizing them, by articulating them also with concepts allowing us to have a little grip on what lives in us while escaping us. »
And if we continue on its momentum?