Status Updates From The Alchemy of Illness

“Illness, like so many forms of adversity l, brings out the worst in us while requiring the most of us, and it works this exorcism of sorts through the very features we find so offensive in the sick: the bad breath, runny noses, and oozing sores, the cough, spitting, crying and vomiting.”

“Her illness was the cure, nit the affliction. Indeed, from a buffets perspective, it was an opportunity for enlightenment.”

“Having to drop the struggle to “make something of myself and find a place in the world” through “acts of will and effort” and learn to “surrender and accept what I had become” instead.

“Wholeness moralism” - “tendency to accept people only when they get better, heal or want to heal.”

“As a result, the ongoing exhaustion of my illness has slowly undermined my “good girl” persona and perfectionist habits I had learned as a child to steer my way through land mines of adult psyches, and it has cultivated in me a self-attentiveness I now need in order to survive.”

“In illness there is the fact that we cannot hide in our bodies or from our bodies, and also the burning desire to do so.”