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

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

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.

The less we understand about a disease or a symptom, the more we psychologize, and often stigmatize, it.

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.

For this is the strange thing about a vulnerability that remains unseen by others, an illness that is unacknowledged by society. It is the sick person whose worldview warps, the wounded one who absorbs the idea that the most indelible aspect of her present condition is in fact a defect, a distortion of her own making.

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.

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.

Concerned about “the thousand intricate problems . . . which perplex those who struggle to-day in our teeming city hives,” the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell wondered, “Have we lived too fast?” He published Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked not in 2021, but in 1871. Mitchell is one of the men responsible for diagnosing an epidemic of