“In America’s techno-medical system, a person who is sick becomes something less than a person on entering a doctor’s office.” Reading this sentence in Meghan O’Rourke’s (very amazing) book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness rang true not just for my entire medical history, but also for the medical “journey” (a.k.a. nightmare) I’ve been on for the past seven months.
Throughout most of my life, I have off and on felt some version of unwell. I distinctly remember days when I would have the thought “This is just one of those weeks where my body feels broken for no reason.”
It’s a Saturday morning at 9:30. The sun is shining. If there were birds around they’d be singing. I’m in a standardized testing center in who-knows-what-neighborhood on the outskirts of San Francisco, and I’m crouched on the freezing cold floor of a bathroom stall crying my eyes out.
When I was 20 years old, I decided to stop eating. It was a very conscious decision, planned and organized meticulously like everything else in my life, and I approached it with the same stubborn determination that has always been both one of my greatest strengths and one of my greatest weaknesses.