Illness exceptionalism
Kelsey Osgood's "How to Disappear Completely" is the ED memoir I have been looking for.
I have so many half-finished articles I will post as soon as they’re done but I keep trying to make them done and they aren’t done. I got married at the beginning of this month, and then went on a sprawling and disjointed honeymoon which spanned several provinces and drained my savings. I was rocked stupid by comfort and joy: sleeping in misty forests in the back of a borrowed car, throwing my body into the ocean again and again, eating fatty globules of salted fish and seed bread in the back yard of my husband’s childhood home. The lead-up to my wedding was a smattering of anxieties, a mixture of many things: the first being that I feel like I’ve lost my capacity to event plan, or plan for the future in any real capacity, either as a result of the psychological impact of the pandemic as a whole, 1 or maybe due to lingering long-COVID symptoms.2 The second being that my wedding party all seemed to get sick at once, and I realized cancelling was the only reasonable option, and I wanted to desperately and felt embarrassed and disappointed and guilty about it all at the same time.