How Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill Relates to My Chronic Illness
Kate Bush’s music has always been a calling card for a certain sort of unusual. When her voice first wound its way onto the airwaves with Wuthering Heights in 1978, no one else sounded like her. I’ve been obsessed with her since my parents played their VHS of Live at Hammersmith Odeon to an energetic toddler determined to recreate her abstract dance style. More recently, Instagram accounts like @wileywindymemes have tapped into an audience of over 13 thousand followers who are united by a love of Kate Bush and who just so happen to relate to a certain sort of outsider humour. The past three months have seen the hit TV show Stranger Things popularised Bush far beyond even that crowd. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) has hit number one, something it didn’t manage to achieve in the USA or even the UK upon its first release in 1985.
In an interview from the year the single was released, Bush herself says the song describes the tragedy of a couple who love each other so much, their love prevents them from understanding each other. Yet Running Up That Hill is not your regular break up song. Bush recently said in an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour that she really likes people to hear her songs and take from it what they want.
Hinted at throughout Stranger Things is the sentiment which makes the song central to the character of Max - a recognition of the way that her complex trauma has distanced her from her friends, classmates and the professionals trying to help her. She uses the song to block out the questions that it feels like she just has no ‘right answer’ to. I have, thankfully, never had a step-sibling skewered by an inter dimensional monster, but I have sat in many, many offices listening to sympathetic professionals say "I can help, you just need to tell me what's wrong" - as if saying it isn't one of the hardest parts.
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Running Up That Hill opens with the lyrics ‘It doesn’t hurt me/ Do you want to feel how it feels?’ In a song about the pain of misunderstandings, Bush starts with an experience well-known to those in pain - of denying, playing down what they are experiencing for another, and yet simultaneously, sincerely hoping that the other will go past this obfuscation and will understand what you mean when you say that it isn’t that bad.
Living with chronic pain traps you in an impossible balancing act living in pain while trying not to upset, or annoy, or inconvenience others with an unsolvable problem. Sometimes you get too good at it. In the summer of 2021, Spotify helpfully recorded that I had listened to over 2,500 minutes of Kate Bush, the equivalent of listening to Hounds of Love in full 52.8 times. The summer of 2021 is also the last time I attempted to seek help for my chronic illness. The medical world has set ways of describing pain; they ask ‘Is it aching, biting, shooting, sharp, heavy, hot? Where is it on a scale from one to ten?’ Having the words to describe the feeling that separates them from a ‘well’ person can be liberating. But what about when you can’t find the words? When you don’t know what it is that makes you different?
I have sat in front of so many medical professionals that tell me they had never heard of a problem like mine and asked, very gently, whether maybe I am describing it wrong - is it actually like this, or maybe like this? It felt like they were not just rephrasing my pain, but rewriting it into something more palatable, something with an easier solution. It was as if I was not just describing it wrong, but experiencing it wrong. I was often left feeling like begging for their reassurance, as Bush does, that ‘We both matter, don’t we?’
Susan Sontag once wrote that ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick… Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ I have lived as a citizen of ‘that other place’ for so long that I no longer know how to speak the language of the well.
How do you explain what ‘better’ means, when you know it is not the symptom that has changed, but that you got more sleep last night, that you managed to cook and eat a particularly good meal the other day, that you are looking forward to seeing friends that evening - but you are still in so much pain that you throw up after the appointment? After a decade this pain is so completely part of me it often feels as if only divine intervention could bring these two disparate worlds together, could remind me of what it feels like to be well, just as it would take to show someone what it means to be unwell.
“Living with chronic pain traps you in an impossible balancing act living in pain while trying not to upset, or annoy, or inconvenience others with an unsolvable problem.”
Like Bush however, I do not and cannot imagine wishing for a permanent exchange, a permanent escape from my body. In the same way that I would never want to fit into the category of ‘straight’ just because it is easier, I do not wish to fit into the category of ‘well’ just because it is more convenient for society. We live in a world where sickness is cured or it kills. Rarely do we just get to live through it, with it. Running up that Hill isn’t about finding a cure for the damage wrought on individuals by conflicting societal boxes: it is about dreaming of someone seeing ‘where the bullets lie’, about someone understanding you in spite of the things you cannot change.
In a world where the dominant narratives seek a positive resolution, the ill healed, the well understanding, it is revolutionary to have something to turn to that recognises that acknowledging pain wouldn’t end it. Yet we crave that recognition all the same.
Words: Esmee Wright
