Jess

“there exists a vast liminal expanse that stretches between wellness and illness.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

“I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself: I’ll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I needed.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The neutral. I am speaking of the vital element that binds things. Oh, I am not afraid that you don’t understand, but that I understand myself badly. If I don’t understand myself, I’ll die from the same thing I live from. Now let me tell you the scariest part: I was being carried off by the demonic. For the inexpressive is diabolic. A person who isn’t committed to hope lives the demonic. A person who has the courage to cast off feelings discovers the ample life of an extremely busy silence, the same that exists in the cockroach, the same in the stars, the same in the self — the demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and superstitious fallacy, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains