This was a combination of memoir, science, and philosophy focusing on concussion and illness.

* maybe you understand Virginia Woolf, who, writing from her own sickbed, tells you friends change during illness, “some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads”
* you have fallen through a trapdoor you never suspected existed—a special door not seen by the untrained eye—and what it shows you is what only the angels can envy—how people suffer, how they go on despite it. This will feels, some days, like the most precious gift.
* doubt, like a river, has 2 banks: that which separates cannot easily be crossed.
* In her groundbreaking work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, “For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what is to ‘have certainty,’ while for the other person it is so elusive that ‘hearing about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt.’ Thus pain comes unshareably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.” Pain, language—the things that make us most human are too often what alienate us, keep us apart.
* Part of the sentence is not knowing how long the sentence is. (punishment = sentence)
* disability, whatever our gross assumptions and beliefs about it, carries legitimacy, whereas chronic illness, especially when it cannot be seen, raises flags.
* insurance companies taught us to be suspicious of people who are in pain.
* to doubt means to earn our belief when it finally arrives. to leap is to have the courage to doubt.
* …lying is a social act. We prefer to forget this, but lying is cooperative, lying is collaborative. For my lie to work, you must join me in it. You want to be lied to.
* Virginia Woolf tried to warn us, “Illness is the great confessional,” but I rarely listen. To be honest, I am afraid to write the words—because I have lived with the lie for so long. I have carried it the way some people carry heavy gear up a narrow mountain path. I suppose after a while I felt too light without it, like something would be missing if I put it down, there would be less of me, and too much of the person I never wanted to become. The lie protects something not only outward facing, but buried deep. It hints at partial truths that expose my denial, your complicity. There is the invisibility of the injury, and then there is the decision to remain invisible. Anyone who has has had to hide their illness knows this feeling.
* You are alone…A lie might be the loneliest place to live.
* When you’re standing on the shore, drowning rarely looks like drowning. People think that because the swimmer is not thrashing around, they must be okay, not realizing that, in trying to keep their mouth above water, the person has gone still.
* Rachel Cusk writes in Outline, “it has seemed to me… that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”
* …regret is often a result of ambivalence surrounding our choices—most of the time, we don’t know really what we want.
* Trauma is the only thing that we let get to a stage 4 before we start to treat it, and the treatment is prison.
* “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag tells us…
* Suzanne keen tells us a gap indicates a fundamental asymmetry that is inevitably, if unconsciously, acted upon by others. For instance, when I blank on the writer’s name… you might have assumptions about my intelligence, my competency. When I am too sick to come to the party… you close the gap with your own explanations… The minute we are gone—even when we are still here—people rush in to fill the space that once belonged to us.
* Illness, like fiction, is all about time. In both, there is the temporal unfolding of the narrative (i.e., will she get better or won’t she). IN both, there is biographical time (i.e., a lifetime). There is a lot of boredom in sick time… in story time, you might begin with the phrase “later that day” or “five years later.” But in illness time, you must live out every one of those moments over the 5 years.
* Normalcy is being in time with others, but in illness we are in time with no one. This is not simply because a week must now be measured by doctor visits, sessions with the neurologist, physical therapy in 20min increments, 5 min a day of pills that add up to 2.5 hours a month, the thankless part-time job that is recovery. Rather, our cultural understanding of what our lives should look like—which we unconsciously base on what others our age get to do or be—becomes corrupted. Those familiar temporal rhythms we have marched along to become meaningless, all habitual experience of time distorted.
* “The struggle for control over illness and for control over time is a struggle to control the defining images of self.” (Kathy Charmaz)
* But Suzanne Keen asks, what about contradictory narratives, wherein incompatible or irreconcilable versions of the self appear, namely You and the You you could have been, had you not hurt your brain; conflated narratives, in which 2 different times coexist, that is, you are here sick in bed and you are also not here, you are anywhere else, anything to escape the awfulness of here; differential narratives, in which you age at a different rate than the people around you; circular narratives, which return you to the beginning, to where you were when this all started, the day of the accident, only now, after all that has happened, you have irrefutable insight.
* Annie Dillard says that whatever memory you put in the page, it becomes fossilized—thus, no longer a memory at all, but an object to hold in our hands and examine. A gift, I think, to take something that has been harboring inside you all this time, cast it out.
* But seriously, did this have to be a work of nonfiction?… Yes. All we have of concussion are false stories.
* David Brooks once wrote, in a stunning response to an impossible question posed by a stranger in pain, “We all know cases where suffering didn’t break people but broke them open.” How wonderful, to be broken in this way.