The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
“Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century... See more
…what the sociologist Michael Bury calls ‘biographical disruption.’ His work highlights how the experience of illness or breakdown ruptures the fabric of normal life and forces us to rethink our relationships to our bodies, our lifeworld, our mortality, our values and our identity.
Vincent Deary • How We Break
Elsewhere, while COVID-19 may have abated from peak hellish weirdness, the narratives that collapsed then have not been put back together again
ZORA ZINE • The Laws of Lorecore
these new diseases are stubbornly unknowable. They exist without cause, course, or cure. They are nothing more or less than their self-reported symptoms. They are metaphor as illness.