Sublime

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

a lived experience that in some ways resists description,

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

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

One self disappeared, and a new, more dependent self emerged.

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

this book is about living with, rather than eradicating or defeating, a disease: a story about letting go of the American ethos of overcoming and about confronting our mutual interdependence.

The medical uncertainty compounds patients’ own uncertainty.