Unweaving the Web: On Creating Your Own Narrative of Illness and Health

You can flush a tick down the toilet or slap away a mosquito, but you must not harm a spider.

That was the house rule in my family of animist writers who saw their own art form miniaturized in the industrious spinning of those tiny arachnid bards. Spiders were writers too. The only difference between us and them was that they told stories with their whole bodies. Sticky stories. Stories secreted by special glands and expelled sticky like milk, like glaucous tears.

My mother and father gifted me with a reverence for that embodied storyteller, which sewed together a web that was simultaneously a home, an extended brain, and a way of catching and caching food. Stories were not a solely human creation. Stories were sewn in attic rafters, dew-encrusted hammocks slung between dandelion stalks. They were diaphanous silk that could sate your appetite with a captured fly and provide a resting spot for your weary body.

Watching a spider stitching together telephone lines one morning, I was curious about the mechanics and found that what the spider is doing involves no actual “spin” or rotation, but rather a full-body warp and weft effort, as it inches silk out of its abdomen by the force of its weight falling under its own thread or extracted by its own legs. The idea of the spinning spider is analogous to textile spinning wheels. By a mechanism of pultrusion, it does not expel the silk so much as it works to remove the silk from its gland manually.

As I confronted my diagnosis of genetic disease and PTSD, I relied on the metaphor of weaving. Wasn’t I a storyteller, allied with spiders and cosmic spinners? My working theory was that the more complete my understanding of my unique bodily and psychological failings, the more complete the woven tapestry of my possible health would become. If only I could find the frayed edge of my threadbare spirit. Then I could connect all the loose ends.

Across cultures, storytelling is compared to both weaving and spiders. The spider is repeatedly cast as a bardic deity—the Sumerian spider goddess Uttu and the Ashanti’s Ananse. The Moirai of Greece used their dexterous fingers to spin, spool, and splice the thread of a person’s fate. And, likewise, in Norse mythology, the three Norns controlled the threads of personal destiny. Ariadne’s red thread that Theseus follows through the Cretan labyrinth can be read as a way of weaving the hero into a successful narrative. He follows the thread while we follow him, word by word, through the labyrinth woven within the story. Without a thread, the labyrinth cannot be navigated or “told.”

In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope—although she is named for the Greek word pēnē, meaning “weft”— interrupts the simplistic trope of the woven story. Penelope will not simply complete a piece of cloth or tie off the last knot in a narrative episode.

The story is familiar enough. Odysseus, her husband, has been absent for years fighting a war in Troy. Penelope waits patiently for his return, but is soon besieged with suitors and naysayers who assume that Odysseus is dead and that the clever and beautiful Penelope needs a new partner. A simplistic reading of Penelope casts her in the role of the chaste and faithful wife, never losing hope that her husband is alive. But, as an older reader returning to the Odyssey with a deeper understanding of historical Homeric tradition, I found that in Penelope’s cunning, alternative poetics emerged.

Faced with demanding suitors, Penelope insists that they must wait until she finishes a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Laertes. Yet, every night she secretly unweaves her “great web.” If we read these fraying threads as representing temporality and narrative progression, leading us on a straight line through the thick tapestry of our lives, then Penelope is unspooling time. She unweaves the Fates/Moirai’s threads each night, refusing fate, refusing to complete her shroud, and refusing to end Laertes’s life or her marriage to the absent Odysseus. Death is deferred. Widowhood is denied. Time is interrupted.

Penelope instead rejects the smug epiphanic completions of masculine heroic modes. She invokes what poet Lyn Hejinian would characterize as an “open text.” As opposed to a text that strives for conclusion and singular interpretation, “the open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening.” Hejinian summons Hélène Cixous to explain that “a feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no closure, it doesn’t stop.” The opening Penelope seeks not to close is physical—the open spousal space beside her that longs for Odysseus’s return. By rejecting the craft of closure, by rejecting the completion of the shroud and its subsequent burial, she is keeping both her marital status and the narrative itself “open.” Text and textile are paradoxically kept alive by being repeatedly undermined and undone.

What happens when the spider finishes the web? What happens when the silk dries up? Is that really the point of spinning and weaving? To complete the web? What textile am I weaving when I tell a story about my life with certainty? Is it a bridal veil? A decorative tapestry to be hung up and forgotten? Or is it my own shroud?

Odysseus, like Penelope, survives ordeals not by settling on a single narrative interpretation, but by his cunning instinct to decompose and recompose his narrative to suit the political and social biases of a new audience. I have often imagined Penelope as a stand-in for the Homeric bard himself, weaving and unweaving the shroud and helping her husband to weave and unweave his own story on his meandering trip back to his homeland of Ithaca. To finish the shroud, then, would be to doom her husband to one story that was no longer malleable to shifting circumstances. Penelope calls her craft “a great web,” reminding me of the spider in its self-excreted story. Is Odysseus a node of the web, responsive to the tugs and twitches of his arachnid spouse? And what is Penelope as weaver doing when she unweaves the web?

For years, I had subscribed to a narrative of fragmentation and dissociation in my own life. I had been unwoven from health and stability by trauma and chronic illness. I needed a definitive diagnosis, a straightforward healing plot, a devoted partner, a happy heteronormative ending, to weave myself back into the safety of the dominant culture.

As I devoted myself to Western medicine and psychotherapy, I strongly believed that I was weaving a web of healing. But I had forgotten that we are not always the authors of the stories we inhabit and live inside, even when we have a sense of manufactured choice. Just because we are a character does not necessarily mean we are the author writing our fate. To paraphrase Melissa Febos’s writing about internalized patriarchy and consent, “We are always unreliable narrators of our own motives.” Those motives are often not self-excreted from our silk glands, but instead webs inherited from previous spinners. Spinners devoted to our subjugation and defeat.

It is crucial to understand when we are not the authors of the web. Many of us are the flies stuck within the web’s mesh.

Unweaving can be as liberating as weaving. The key is to know when the web does not belong to us. The key is recognizing when the web is not a home but a shroud.

For those of us caught within limiting narratives, untelling a story is as important as its initial weaving.

A good story can produce miraculous effects in our bodies. This well-observed phenomenon is known as the placebo effect. Sugar pills or medical interventions without direct physiological effects miraculously produce psychological and physical benefit. They convince our own immune systems to “wake up” and enact self-healing. Placebos often outperform the actual drugs they are being studied against. Our faith in the story about a medicine is often the medicine itself. If the story is told well enough, it can literally save someone’s life by activating their own immunological resilience.

When I read accounts of healing in the Mediterranean during the time of Jesus, I understood a contemporaneous cultural belief in miracles and miracle workers set the stage for placebo healing. Spit in the eyes, a hand on your feverish head, and a gathered crowd all praying and rooting for your regeneration created a theater of healing. If you truly believed that God was working through a magician when he performed his rituals, it was enough to wake up your beleaguered immune system. Perhaps these miraculous healings weren’t supernatural, but profoundly natural—showcasing the power of good theater and our bodies’ ability to respond positively to a well-crafted story.

But as powerful as the placebo effect is the nocebo effect. A bad story—a story of a degenerative prognosis, expected complications, unpleasant side effects—can manifest these outcomes. This effect, unlike the placebo, is unintentional and rampant within for-profit health care. Doctors who don’t make eye contact and give curt answers and forget your patient history do not inspire confidence. Thus, when the doctors give us drugs, we are less likely to believe in their efficacy. The theater of healing becomes the theater of anonymity and mistrust.

When a doctor tells us a list of negative side effects for a new drug, we are more likely to experience said side effects. Our expectations have been primed for discomfort and disease. Recent developments within the realm of cognitive science show that predictive processing has huge effects on our internal physical state. Our predictions about our future physical state create our future physical state. Most gravely, when a patient receives a dire prognosis or a list of symptoms attached to a new diagnosis, they are at an increased risk of living out those new stories. Yes, a diagnosis often leads to life-saving intervention. But for those with autoimmunity and complex, incurable conditions, it can also be a thread through a labyrinth you never wanted to enter. Suddenly, you find yourself finishing your own shroud.

Unweaving the web, then, is unweaving the cobwebs that have begun to clog up your mind.

Unweaving the potential surgeries and medical emergencies. Unweaving the predicted decline. Unweaving the belief that miracles don’t happen, and healing is hard work.

This unweaving of a story or a diagnosis can feel like madness. It can feel like we are taking apart something that was a home. A web of meaning to grasp onto. But it can also be the necessary decomposing of narratives that ensured our deaths, our defeats, our husbands never coming home to Ithaca, stranded on a distant nymph’s island.

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From The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human by Sophie Strand. Copyright © 2025. Available from Running Press, a division of Hachette Book Group.