Book Review: The Surrender Agenda

The Surrender Agenda by Lorraine Ansell is a title that reflects my motto of fight back to get your life back from dark times when life tears you in two. I am writing a book on why work matters which includes how disabilities and health conditions prevent or complicate employment and your life. I am the son of a disabled father and was temporarily disabled when under the power of OCD in my twenties.

Lorraine has the painful condition Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and this book is her pain memoir. It is literally all about pain. The daily pain that comes with the syndrome and comorbidities, plus the pain that comes with miscarriages, trapped wind, detached retinas, racism, socialism and career struggles.

Her life is on the page and her honesty is refreshing. I am pleased the laser surgery to save her sight succeeded to allow her to write this book. Although I suspect she would have wrote it even if she were blind, despite the pain from typing and the deletion of swear words when Word dictate failed her. This is just my assumption based on what she shares.

Lorraine is in daily pain but has still written a book, gone to university, worked, commuted around London, socialised, lived her life. Some disabled people cannot do all these things, no matter how much they might want to. That must never be forgotten in the battle to make it a world accessible to all.

“Even sleeping causes me to injure myself and be in pain. Maybe those nightmares were real after all?” I sometimes have a nightmare that my legs stop working when I am in public and I have to sit on the pavement as everyone keeps walking past me, wondering what I will say if a passer-by asks if I need help. Sometimes monsters are real and this book gives you the courage not to be scared.

Lorraine’s reflections on her Chilean heritage show a different kind of pain as she talks about the coup in Chile in the 1970s where her family lived through curfews, food shortages, gunfire, torture and murder in an oppressive police state. Her uncle was disappeared and her parents to the UK where she was born. “I have learnt that I am a highly sensitive person and this time in history has left a profoundly deep effect on me. I feel it deeply and keenly...I still cry at the thought of people being vanished, being killed, having to leave everything they know; their friends, their home, their family, their job, their loves. And to then build a new life in a strange land.”

An insightful book. Get ready for the pain.