Sublime

As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.

I needed words to go forward.

We saw every type of doctor you could imagine, lost count of how many treatments and therapies we tried, spent thousands of dollars, gave up all hope of her getting better, and started making plans for an early death. I was in my mid-thirties making plans to be a single father.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a whil

Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry.

that it’s describing.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework.