in my fatigue and pain I couldn’t find the words to make myself legible to others. (And I still have not found them. This text is full of silences and vagueness and lacunae: when I write “brain fog,” I imagine that your mind slides over the idea, unless you, too, have suffered from it.)

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need.

To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.