the artist formerly known as

The hardest thing to convey to doctors or friends was the debilitating fatigue, which many other patients I knew experienced as well. Complaining of fatigue sounds like moral weakness; in New York City, tired is normal. But the fatigue of physical dysfunction, I came to recognize, is as different from normal sleep deprivation as COVID-19 is from the common cold. It was not caused by needing sleep, I thought, but by my body’s cellular conviction that it needed to conserve energy in order to fix whatever was wrong. The feeling erased my will, the sense of identity that drives most of us. The worst part of my fatigue was the loss of an intact sense of self. It wasn’t just that I suffered brain fog; it wasn’t just the loss of self that sociologists talk about in connection with chronic illness, in which everything you know about yourself disappears and you have to build a different life. Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. […] To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you. “Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct,” Daudet writes—a line I now often thought of.