Sublime

If I am to abide with these patients, then I must accompany them to that place among the rocks, to the sweating wall. I must face with them the uncertainty of what lies beyond. I must stand at the edge with them and peer over into the fathomless depths. If I tell my patients, as I do, that this life can be a tolerable one, that they can face their

The body mystifies. The mind more so. Witnessing their complex intersections—and the unbidden ways in which the two can catastrophically fray—can unmoor us.

From the earliest days of my medical career I’d held a deep, intuitive feeling, almost a sympathetic pain for patients whose illnesses made them unrecognizable, sometimes even to themselves. Perhaps because I’d experienced my own identity as fragile, my old fear of not having a handwriting, I saw myself in these patients.

She is, it turns out, thinking about the body. How we inhabit the architecture of the bodies we are given. How our bodies can be powerful and how they can be encumbrances. How they can feel inextricably linked to our identities yet how they can also misrepresent and betray us.