Quotes from Meghan O'Rourke

Without quite noticing it, I had slid downward to a place where, as Styron put it, "all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity.

As Susan Sontag pointedly observes in Illness as Metaphor, illnesses we don't understand are frequently viewed as manifestations of inner states. The less we understand about a disease or a symptom, the more we psychologize, and often stigmatize, it.

is difficult to be a patient for long without coming up against the hard truth that what you are searching for and what your doctor is offering are two entirely different things.

our culture tends to psychologize diseases it doesn't yet understand

care effect,' " Nathanael Johnson wrote in Wired in 2013, "the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health.

A doctor's job, like a gambler's, is intimately tied up with failure; the house always wins over time.

While conservatives like to put the focus for health on individual responsibility and "lifestyle," a term they use as a weapon, Geronimus's research reminds us of the social, interconnected nature of our bodies and our health, and the way that racism exacts debilitating vigilance from Black bodies.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

But as more and more "small things" went wrong—endometriosis, hives, the labral tear in my hip, the arthritis in my neck, the thyroid disease, the failure to get pregnant, the fatigue and brain fog—I had started to see my body differently, not as a collection of parts but as an entangled system.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework. Even

My body felt like a vow that had been irrevocably broken.

Like many in their baby boomer generation, they saw doctors as unquestionable experts. You didn't go to them unless you had a high fever or a bad fall or a wound that needed stitching. In that case, you got a diagnosis, you took medicine or had surgery, and you got better, more or less in that order. But if the doctor told you nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong. My parents believed in the power of Western medicine, and therefore so did I.

As the chronically ill know, to be alive is to be in uncertainty.

If medicine can't see or name the problem, it can neither study it nor treat it.

Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily, La Rochefoucauld wrote.

I was not myself, but if I was not myself, how did I know that? It was as if the old me, the authentic me, were inside, struggling to break free of the forces that had inhabited its body. The ghost within.

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.