Sep 22, 2022
Pickles Taught Me the Art of Self-Preservation
I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.
I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.
I couldn’t fight off the sense that there is a certain absurdity to getting tested for a disease for which there is currently no cure.
This dichotomy in American health care is well-known to patients with chronic illness.
All my life, I had looked for answers in books, and I was no different when it came to endometriosis.
I want medicine to meet me where I am, not where it wants me to be.
I got a D in math and my sister got cancer. These aren’t causalities, only things that happened one right after the other.
I have spent most of my life hating the fact of having a body. It makes sense that my body would eventually start to hate me back.
On some level I know the system is designed to break me down, but I feel guilty because I am good at letting it.
Who will remember a girl’s pain when the evidence disappears?
Can I trust the sparse memories in my long-Covid brain? If I don’t record this, will my Frankenstein-ed memories escape, just like Grandma’s did?
Am I ever going to know where I hope to escape to? I understand that I’m trying escape from reality, but I’m still not clear on what the destination is.
“Howl’s Moving Castle” and “The Legend of Korra” are about protagonists living with magic and fighting for the fate of the world. To me, they’re also metaphors for dynamic disability.
With every step, I realized I didn’t have to be juggling All The Things to be a worthwhile member of society. I just needed to exist.
In the emergency room waiting for a potential diagnosis, I soothe myself with loops of pudgy toddlers tripping into the antics of babyhood over and over again.
Many times I could have said the same as Gawain, terrified in the face what was to come, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”
How much does my fear of owning this darker voice hinge on a cultural insistence that it’s unhealthy, even unnatural? What if I’m all of it?
Nora Feely on unrealistic storylines and tropes of characters with cancer, what it means to "survive," gratitude and toxic positivity, and more.
A space has been created by this unflinching journalism, this unabashed Instagram memoir.
I believed I had been nurtured, like a lamb, for one purpose: Mine was to be thin.
And does asking these questions make me a good mother?
