when the world assumes wellness

But here’s the problem with modernity. We live in a time where we are surrounded by stressors. Right now, I have 56 emails in my inbox that need my attention. My body is responding to that with stress (this body of ours is also not great at knowing the difference between life-and-death stressors and the kinds of stressors that won’t kill me). My un

I watched the lives of others with a sense of wistfulness. I missed the burn of Scotch in my throat, the loose joy of a dinner party where everyone got a little high on talk. I wanted to be sloppy and fun again. “How are you doing?” Gina asked one morning. “I don’t know if I can take this anymore,” I told her. “I just want to get better. I want to

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. —Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

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

our medical system, for all its extraordinary capabilities, is ill-equipped to handle the steep rise in this kind of chronic illness. That system is great at providing acute care and terrible at managing the complexities of long-term care.

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

our bodies may feel autonomous, but we all live in the nexus of radical interconnection. Our bodies are always in communication with other bodies: our immune system is responsive not only to collective health policies but also to the emotions and affects of others. The immune-dysregulated body, therefore, is an embodiment of our porousness to one a

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.

By 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.