Normal People Was More Than the Book on My Hospital Bedside Table
A personal essay on disability, love, radical acceptance and Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
Changu Nan'gandu Chiimbwe
At night, the ritual here is always the same. A nurse aid stands at my bedside, and as it seems, her task for the evening is complete: I’ve been dressed for the night, medicated, and, with her help, turned on my side to lessen the myriad health risks that a spinal cord injury can bring in its aftermath. She’s about to leave but then looks at my bedside table. She remembers:
“Your water bottle,” she says, beginning to check off the list, “your phone, your charger, and your book.”
She places these last three items into the bed with me, and we both hold back a few giggles. Between her and some of the other nurse aids who oversee my nightly routine in the hospital, it’s become a funny thing, this need of mine to cradle these specific objects beside me as I attempt to sleep as if they were stuffed animals from my early years. The phone is what they comment on the most. “Oh, you Gen Z kids and your phones.” “I have a daughter your age, and she never puts that thing down!” I’m desperate for some humor at a time like this, so I laugh with them.
No one says anything about the book: Normal People by Sally Rooney.
I had watched the Hulu adaptation when it first premiered, and I loved it for the simple reason that it was human. Allergic then to self-introspection of any kind, I acted like my connection to Marianne Sheridan (the show’s complicated female lead) was not as deep as my heart was making it out to be. I watched a miniseries that I enjoyed, I added the novel to an already lengthy TBR list, I let it become an afterthought for a year, and that was that.
When I bought the book a few months before my injury, I didn’t make it beyond the first few pages. I found its writing style flat when I expected it to be compelling. The book was left untouched until I was scheduled for an elective scoliosis correction in early August of 2021 after years of dealing with chronic back pain and the concerning prospect of my curve worsening as I grew older. I was to spend a few days in the hospital, and I am never without a book, so I chose the shortest book from my bedroom’s library with the flattest prose to keep me engaged without much effort and mildly entertained. Ultimately, a misaligned screw bruised my spinal cord during the operation, developing into Brown-Séquard Syndrome. When I woke up in a body permanently destroyed, I couldn’t care less about Sally Rooney’s prose or books or reading in general. I wanted my old body back, and, most importantly, I wanted to be able to walk again.
But there, in the hospital room where I received acute care, Normal People, with its white line art dashed across a split-screen of green and blue, stuck out like a sore thumb among my collection of bare necessities. Sometimes, after a long day of trying to force my leg to move or feel the touch of doctors’ gloved hands, I’d find myself explaining the plot in a drug-induced haze to psychologists and physical therapists and physician’s assistants who were most likely feigning curiosity to keep me from mentally breaking under the weight of my new reality. When my mom and dad began taking turns spending nights at my bedside, constantly moving back and forth between New York City and our home in the nearby suburbs, I didn’t ask them to take the book back, and I didn’t ask for another. I let it sit there, out in the open, and this continued through the few months I spent at a second hospital in my hometown.
I slept with the book at my side for some time before attempting to crack open the pages once more. It was the strangest way that anyone could cope with dying and awakening to a new life in a broken body. Nearly driven mad with grief, I finally fell back into reading Normal People because I was convinced it would grant me the impossible gift of time travel. Perhaps, I thought, I’ll again become a young girl with functioning limbs and organs on the cusp of nineteen, wrapped in the comfort of my blankets whilst watching this love story unfold on my laptop. I recognize this scene and this character’s voice from an old memory—maybe, just maybe, for a moment, I can go back to life as it was before.
I turned pages while I tested my endurance, learning how to sit in a wheelchair while I rested fatigued and flat on my back, hooked up to an IV, attempting to slip away from the here and now. And then a set of lines from Marianne jolted me awake:
I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born. (pg. 187)
I couldn’t remember if I’d heard these lines from the show, but I’d certainly heard them somewhere. What broke the surface of my memory was the old feeling that festered within me the first time I watched the way Marianne navigated the world around her, the inkling that I was merely watching myself in another life on screen. I thought then that I was only connected to her because of our similar introversion and insecurity, but in the hospital, I realized something new. My current self-perception, like Marianne’s, was a product of my traumatic environment.
As a novel, Normal People places you in Marianne’s surroundings in a way that makes the aftershocks of her abuse press against your skin. With her toxic friendships and relationships throughout the book, Marianne becomes less of the enigma she sees herself as and, instead, becomes something more understandable. In my case, I came to resonate with her feelings about love because I, too, was being choked by a trauma that seemed endemic. Her words seemed to reach out from the pages to try and break bread with me.
Marianne Sheridan, at her core, grapples with the idea that she is fundamentally unlovable, innately doomed never to experience what nurtures and keeps the human spirit alive. It only wrenched me open at the hospital because it began to spread all over my body: here it was in my nonfunctional legs, tampered spine, racing heart, and jagged breaths. I could no longer hide it as it spilled out into the open. My fear then became whether other people could see that I was unlovable too.
I stopped reading the book in the hospital shortly thereafter.
However, diverting my attention elsewhere once I gave up on reading Normal People any further proved to be difficult. I couldn’t lose myself in my music or the movies, and reality shows that I would watch with my mom when she came to visit me. I was brought to face myself in the mirror by force: rendered hyper-visibly disabled, I believed now more than ever that I couldn’t make people love me as I was.
I wondered if my father believed the same of me when he spoonfed me one evening during a visit and if my mother was at her wit’s end with keeping me clean and properly medicated when I was cleared to return home. For months I was a shut-in by choice, and when I allowed myself to hang out with my best friend for the first time since my injury, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was thinking of the last time she saw me in the flesh, drunkenly dancing along to Abba’s “Lay All Your Love On Me” in her living room. The idea that those around me could never love me due to my disability bludgeoned me over the head repeatedly until it suddenly didn’t.
One morning I was seated across from my physical therapist in the lobby of the hospital. At this point in my recovery, there were a million silver linings. With the help of an orthotic strapped to my lower leg and a cane, I was now walking without my mother or a medical professional rushing to be at my side so that I didn’t tip over and fall. My blood pressure no longer plummeted when I rose to stand, and I could take care of myself independently again. A few days prior, I was cleared to return to school in the coming fall. I should’ve been over the moon, giddy with joy and burgeoned by hope, but all I felt was dread. I didn’t have a proper idea of who I was. As it stood, my sense of self was soiled beyond repair, and I defined myself solely by my glaring “fault”; I was a cripple and nothing else. But was it true that everyone else saw me in this light?
“I’m scared that I’ll have a hard time making friends,” is what I told my physical therapist when she asked me what I thought about the academic clearance, but what I ultimately succumbed to was the nagging feeling of my assumed innate “unlovability.”
My physical therapist, who I’d grown close to over the months we worked together, seemed to understand all the same. “Someone who wouldn’t befriend you because of your condition isn’t exactly someone you’d want in your life. The right people will befriend you for who you are.”
Later, I remembered how I made myself finish Normal People for the sake of it months after returning home from the hospital. Marianne was a subtle yet constant presence in my head whenever I was aware of how unloveable I felt, one that I had trouble exorcizing. I seemed to be forgetting that towards the end of the book, her feelings of unworthiness began to resolve because she was surrounded by people who loved her for who she was.
Attempting to search my life for evidence of the same, I first had to spell out what love meant to me. There was only one definition that struck a chord: a tender acceptance of who I was in all my forms without hesitation. I sought out a love in which the lover treasured the beloved in their bare form as if it was second nature, something as fluid and instinctive as breathing or blinking.
It made me think of an afternoon I had spent with my best friend in Manhattan. My body readjusted to walking long distances, so we walked to a theater to catch a screening of Everything Everywhere All At Once. On the walk, my shoelaces became loose, and I watched her kneel to the ground and tie it without breaking our conversation. She stood up and carried on as if nothing had happened, and all notions of my existence being a burden to the people in my life seemed to diminish. I never asked her why she would do such a thing because the answer was obvious. She tied my shoelaces because they were loose. She tied my shoelaces because she knew I was physically incapable of bending down to do it for myself. She tied my shoelaces because she loved me.
Radical acceptance of the love that I received was something that I had to force myself to do. Almost two years into my injury, I look back on my initial connection to Marianne’s self-perception and realize that it wasn’t that I couldn’t make people love me—they already loved me. I was too blinded by my environment to acknowledge it. I was yearning for that which I already had, and all I had to do was look up from my pages and not only witness it but believe what I was seeing before me.
Changu Nan'gandu Chiimbwe is a writer and English literature student based in New York. Her work has appeared in the midnight & indigo literary journal, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere. Whenever she isn't writing, she enjoys baking, watching films and television, and telling everyone about her many manuscripts in progress. You can follow her on Instagram.
