The investigation

“I want you to know the kinds of things that are considered evidence of a woman, who says that she is very sick but is, in fact, lying.”

Hi, friends,

First things first, some housekeeping: I’ll be reading a little bit from my book manuscript at Bishop & Wilde / Tin House this Thursday, May 8. Event details can be found here for those of you in Portland!

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I saw a dear friend this weekend. It had been a long time since we’d had the chance to catch up IRL. Wandering through the woods, we talked about fear and hyper-vigilance, comparing the ways we’re each trying to control the terrifying, too-fast-changing world, and about the limits of our own agency, how meaningless it is to even believe we have agency right now.

I couldn’t help but think about the things constraining my own sense of agency and complicity—which, long before this new awful administration, had felt bound up in my brushes with power and punishment—by the fact that I’m now almost six years into an legal process trying to secure a court settlement from an insurance company, by the fact that this means that I’ve intermittently had a private investigator following me, trying to determine whether or not my invisible disability is real.