Perhaps all along my idea of failure had been wrong. Perhaps my body had been working hard to keep me as well as it could despite a serious, life-altering infection, and I needed to find a new story about it. A story that allowed for the contingency of identity, of health, of hope. One that saw survival of any kind as a form of strength. What I had experienced was life itself, the body straining to survive despite the odds stacked against it.
