Mental illness pierces the veil, and those who suffer from it dwell with their fragility in plain view. My role as a psychiatrist is not to try to repair the veil but to strengthen my patients so that they can live, so that they can suffer less, so that they can hope.

Even if madness is at the root of some of the world’s great creations, it is hard to imagine that if someone asked each of us to live an entire life of suffering in the service of the arts, we would agree to do so. Even if we might choose such altruism, it’s unlikely we would allow anyone else to make that decision for us.

How well can you tolerate my suffering? How well can you sit with the pain?

I have found that one of the gifts of medicine is that it allows those who practice it to participate in the purest and most vulnerable moments of human life.

To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: “. . . There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and be replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort.” To be aware of this in the depths of one’s soul is to experience non-being. It is the

Standing on the edge with my patients—abiding with them—means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.

I adore this about her. The insistence upon beauty and awe being a daily part of her life. The fixed principle of the thing.

I love that she still has these moments when closeness

She is, it turns out, thinking about the body. How we inhabit the architecture of the bodies we are given. How our bodies can be powerful and how they can be encumbrances. How they can feel inextricably linked to our identities yet how they can also misrepresent and betray us.