People rarely ask about my pre-illness interests, and as I recount long-forgotten pastimes, I feel as though I am touring someone else’s life. There’s an old Tunisian saying that your entire life is inscribed on your forehead but it’s as though everything that came before my diagnosis has been scrubbed from mine. I don’t know how it happened, or if it could have been prevented, but at some point in the last few years my entire existence, my identity, even my career, became linked to the worst thing that ever happened to me.
