It can come on you suddenly or gradually: a tsunami or the slowly rising seas eating away at the shoreline till the topography is no longer recognizable. One day you simply wake up underwater, trying desperately not to drown.Article continues after advertisement
I went through both—the gradual creep of illness and the sudden riptide pulling me out to sea. At first it was a small accumulation of changes: broken thyroid, misbehaving heart, guts that refused certain foods. A heart surgery here, a knee surgery there, a burst ovarian cyst to keep things interesting. And in between, long stretches of normalcy. Cloudy days, sunny ones, school and work, sex and friends and fights and books, always more books to read. I stayed away from the ones too much like me, at first. Only read Brain on Fire because my book club chose it; then The Collected Schizophrenias because a family member had the same diagnosis.
And even though these stories sent strange frissons of recognition down my spine, even though I understood the terror of hospital rooms at night, the exhaustion of pretending everything was fine, I couldn’t align myself with them. I hadn’t learned yet that these kinds of stories can look wildly different in their specifics while still following the same pattern as dozens of others.
