Yilin

“To have the dignity of one’s reality: this, I realized, was why I worked so hard to find language to tell my story. I wanted to show how the emphasis on psychological nature of chronic illness in a culture that pathologists the failure to “overcome” robbed people of grace, while instructif them to suffer their illness *with* grace.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“What is new is that today, in our secular, individualistic nation, an amorphous illness is seen inevitably as an opportunity to uncover the
*authentic* nature of the selt and improve it, a project squarely in line with other obsessions of our neoliberal society. The focus on personal realization obscures the fact that it is not our *selves* that are wrong but the very structure of our society, with its failing support systems, its poor chemical regulation, its food deserts, its patchwork health care delivery. Autoimmunity is internalized by patients as an opportunity for the ultimate self-management project. But in fact it is a manifestation of a flawed collective project. If it is an indictment of anything, it is an indictment not of our personhood but of our impulse to see social problems as being *about* our personhood, instead of a consequence of our collective shortcomings as co-citizens of this place and time.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“In this sense, my illness was forcing me to reckon with my identity - it had become what the scholar Mariam Bailin, in her book in Victorian sickroom scenes, calls “a forcing ground of the self.” As Bailin demonstrates, fever was seen in the nineteenth century as a condition that meant something about the patient’s life. In novels, a fever scene often symbolizes a protagonist’s spiritual crisis, a “conventional rite of passage issuing in personal, moral, or social recuperation.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“While conservatives like to put the focus for health on individual responsibility and “lifestyle,” a term they use as a weapon, Geronimus’s research reminds us of the social, interconnected nature of our bodies and our health, and the way that racism exacts debilitating vigilance from Black bodies. That vigilance has an invisible physical cost. The calamity here is not one of the personal failure but of societal failure: the conditions of insecurity that systemic racism not only perpetuated but actively fosters. The state of a person’s immune system is, among other things, a reflection of that person’s socioeconomic status and their history as a citizen of a flawed polis, I now understood.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness