A dispatch from the postdrome

That I’m noticing these things only now that I’m physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing. I feel strangely empty, devoid of thought and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework.

It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationsh

My experience of being ill led me to see that our bodies may feel autonomous, but we all live in the nexus of radical interconnection.

Who am I when I can’t do what I do? Who am I when even life-sustaining connection with others is taken away?