To become chronically is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear - because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My illness story has no destination. Rather, it is the sum of all the ways it taxed and surprised me; all the people it threw me into rough contact with; all the accommodations and limitations it brought with it; the suffering I underwent; the pride I felt at times, at having endured, and at having persevered until I got a diagnosis.

For some people being ill remains so awful and so taxing that it brings nothing other than chaos. Perhaps coming to grasp 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 fact is the wisdom that illness brings with it. But it would be false not to observe that this knowledge is born of loss, of resignation to a condition that forces us to give up on aspects of ourselves we had hoped we might develop. Wisdom, in this understanding, is knowledge coupled with the wound that comes from encountering doom.

Who among us doesn't have some inner conflict? And who, when suffering an inexplicable misfortune for the first time, does not ask, "Why me?" When no one can tell you exactly why you're sick, it is surprisingly easy to tell yourself a story about the illness. Why me? 𝘉𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 of me. You identify with your illness and feel that somehow you have caused it.

The patient has to hold in mind two contradictory modes, in other words: insistence on the reality of the disease and resistance to her own catastrophic fears. After all, a terrible anxiety attends chronic illness. Over time, it becomes difficult to untangle the suffering from symptoms like pain from the suffering inflicted by the anxiety over the possibility of more pain, and worse outcomes, in the future. This does not mean that the illness is in the mind; rather, the mind - that machine for making meaning - makes endless meanings of its new state, which may themselves influence the experience.

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.