I'm actually at capacity right now

the secret is you always are

Long time, no newsletter. I’m in the hospital again! I feel like I should get some kind of perk for this… like my own room that’s sort of reserved for me. No such luck.

In her book The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso writes about being visited by her primary care doctor when, as a freshman in college, she ended up being repeatedly hospitalized with a serious autoimmune condition. The doctor tells her that she had “already endured something much worse than most people have to endure in an entire regular-length life. His voice shook. He was forcing tears either forward or back.”

The young Manguso’s response to this interaction is to drop him as a doctor, fearing “his pity would accrue to me, and would grow in me like the sea of antibodies with which I was already invisibly killing myself.” She comments:

The doctor was older than my parents, and he must have ha…