Emma

“People who don't see you every day have a hard time understanding how on some days--good days--you can run three miles, but can barely walk across the parking lot on other days,' [my mom] said quietly.”
― Jennifer Starzec, Determination

“Your memory feels like home to me.
So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“The medical uncertainty compounds patients' own uncertainty. Because my unwellness did not take the form of a disease I understood, with a clear-cut list of symptoms and a course of treatment, even I at times interpreted it as a series of signs about my very existence. Initially, the illness seemed to be a condition that signified something deeply wrong with me⁠—illness as a kind of semaphore. Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

It took years before I realized that the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society's pathology.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“She has fought many wars, most internal. The ones that you battle alone, for this, she is remarkable. She is a survivor.”
― Nikki Rowe