The Remedy (Dark Corners Collection, #6)

by Adam Haslett

and though as adults our struggles had been different, we recognized in each other a similar kind of dread, a cumulative heaviness that lay behind whatever our particular physical and mental complaints were.

She hadn’t requested a list of symptoms. Your experience of your condition as a whole—that’s what she wanted to know. It was as if, in a single stroke, she were undoing the very premise of all the treatments that had come before, the idea that the suffering could be anatomized and its components addressed.

And how all this led to an endless self-criticism that I was failing to accomplish whatever I might be capable of, a prophecy that seemed to fulfill itself more with each passing year as I fell behind friends and acquaintances in their patchwork progress toward building their adult lives.