Invisible Quotes

“meet me at a doctor’s appointment. A man, I figured, and a man who looks a bit older than I do, might help. But, Simon and I joked, given that he’s a black man, if the doctor ended up being more racist than misogynistic, the effort would be no good. Only if the doctor cared more about a man in the room might this kind of socially conferred authority, regardless of race, help. Otherwise, the reality is that his presence, depending on the doctor, could hurt. What a ridiculous calculation to try to make, I say to Brenda. To hope for a doctor who’s more sexist than racist? It sounds like a joke. But Brenda agrees that it’s real.”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and thePressure to Seem Just Fine

“As Simon put it, we are all a riot wrapped in skin.”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“A number of people I've interviewed have gently pointed out that a disability doesn't have to look like the one clean narrative we see in movies or on feel-good shows, the kind where a person using a wheelchair smiles and reassures everyone that she's fighting the good fight. We have these images in our heads of what disability looks like and what counts. But many of the women I have met have made me realize that disability is largely about the world's failure to make space for you--and that it can be connected to a combination of things your body does, or an invisible syndrome or disease, or a hard-to summarize history of surgeries. It need not be as two-dimensional as it looks on TV.”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“Maybe it sounds like a compliment, You're too young, something to show that you look youthful and vibrant and all. Maybe it's just a refrain I should learn to ignore. But when I talk with other young women who hear it over and over again, they too roll their eyes and look upset. We do feel that we got sick too soon, decades before we'd expect to feel our bodies break down. But if there were truly such a thing as being too young to be sick, then we wouldn't be sick.”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“Shared physical vulnerability, we learned, can become a bizarre aphrodisiac, A bond that is gross and uncomfortable but ultimately positive.

Not so when it is just one of you and the health issue isn't temporary.”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“Language is a tricky thing, especially when we try to capture what's happening in our bodies and in our culture. Words like "health," "healthy," "sick," "illness," and "disability" are always relative and always loaded, rarely static, and often problematic. Words like "women," too. Our definitions are constantly in flux--as are, for instance, the laws that govern our rights. Whose bodies count?”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“As a white Jewish woman, I don’t have to worry much about racism. But doctors sometimes seem to dismiss me as a woman, a young woman. So a few years ago, I asked Simon, who was always offering to accompany me if I wanted him to, to”
― Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and thePressure to Seem Just Fine