I had no ally—worse, the encounter left me with a rusty taste in my mouth, a sense that perhaps I didn’t deserve an ally. 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.
