I was born with a predisposition, maybe. The recipe for it carried like a stowaway in the secret, destructive chemistry of my brain. When I was sick, I beat a retreat from the world. Coming back, even partway, has been hard. It's been easier to live in the body's pain than the mind's. Than the world's.

How much should a person walk their interior. Or travel society's prism of triggers. Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory says we lay down proteins every time we revisit a memory, building it and m...