When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you. “Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct,” Daudet writes—a line I now often thought of.

When I felt off, it was my fault, a sign of some internal weakness, a lack of moral fiber, a crack running through the integrity of my being. “It is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped,” Sontag writes. Indeed: despite all my efforts to think objec

Being heard by your doctor isn’t just an emotional need but a physical one: patients benefit clinically from feeling cared for. The emotional and the physical, science is learning, are more intertwined than we once understood. Many studies have suggested that emotional care—interpersonal warmth—has a measurable effect on patients’ outcomes. For exa

the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society’s pathology.

You cannot muscle your way to health when you are chronically ill. Rather, one way of coming to terms with an amorphous systemic disease is recognizing that you are sick, that the illness will come and go, and that it is not the kind of illness you can conquer.

I hungered for cast-iron certainty even though I realized that I was living in a morass of uncertainty—why

modern medicine’s stigmatization of patients who lack clear-cut test results continues to be a chief shortcoming of the American health care system, which, in its understandable embrace of authoritative answers, struggles to acknowledge what it does not know.

Thinking about disease as a complex individualized consequence of genes and infections and stress and our immune systems means living with uncertainty instead of diagnostic clarity.

If neurasthenic sensitivity was the hallmark of nineteenth-century invalidism, a kind of hyperpersonalized concern with wellness is the hallmark of twenty-first-century invalidism—a quality that lets the rest of us dismiss the invalid as fussy or oversensitive while we get back to our frenetic, endlessly connected, productive lives.