Internet Archive Book Images, via Flickr
“Some people describe it as a lifting of a veil,” I try. “Others describe it as a weight off their chest. And some people just say that they feel like their old self again.” Yet my own recovery from depression has been more complicated: I’ve found that there is no return to a nondepressed self. There is only something new.”
Ketamine
Guernica
“I know too much about the pathophysiology that killed my father. I know how nauseated he must have felt when he woke up that morning, and I know his blood pressure must have bottomed out before he hit the ground. What I don’t know: Was he afraid? Did the internist diagnose himself in his last few seconds? Cardiology has always been my most difficult subject.”
Things Imagined
American Chordata
Amidst the chaos of the COVID pandemic, my mother is energized. She barely has time to read the news. She fields calls from 8am to 10pm. At night I sit on her bed and read Twitter threads with COVID-19 updates to her as she drifts off to sleep. “This is the reason we became infectious disease doctors,” she tells me. “For a moment such as this. The new, the uncharted.” My mother applied into infectious disease in 1983, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. For a moment I see COVID-19 from her perspective––not just as a slow-moving disaster, but a reason to fight.
Anticipating Grief: Bracing for Tragedy in a Pandemic
Harvard Medical Student Review
I appreciate your sympathy, but the fact is that I would much prefer your empathy. If you were to empathize with me—which is to say, if you were to imagine yourself in my position—you would understand that there is nothing unjust about declaring that you have been hurt.
A Dialogue on Race and Speech at Yale
The Atlantic
I can envision a world in which I think of my blackness and I don’t have to think of all the ways in which it makes me vulnerable, and others frightened.