All my life, I have been terrified of being diagnosed. I spent the early months of my infancy in an ICU, of which I have no memory. And, so, in many ways, I have spent my thirty-six years trying to recall what I have so easily forgotten.
Without a label, my suffering remains free, aimless, unconstrained. You cannot cure me of an ailment that remains unnamed. I vacillate between wanting to hear it's nothing, that I'll be okay, that I am okay, while yearning for the acknowledgement that I'm indeed suffering. What is that acknowledgement if not a diagnosis?
How can I be both ill and well at once? If what I have is unnamed, what I could have is anything, even everything. A diagnosis is an exercise in elimination. Until then, possibilities loom large.
A diagnosis is a container. It labels my suffering, articulating in esoteric terms what endless reams of paper have failed to capture. My symptoms become a syndrome, no longer an unnamed, unnameable affliction.
Before you begin to wonder, this piece isn’t an attempt at intrigue. It’s not an instance of self-disclosure or an update on my circumstances, nor am I intentionally withholding the details of what I'm dealing with.
This piece is about what a diagnosis does to you. It's about how you resist being diagnosed, yet how, when the time comes, it finds you anyway. Symptoms breathe down your neck, heavy and hoarse, until you're forced to sit up, clutch your heart in agony, and hear them out. Until you're forced to give them a name. Everything that belongs to you must be named. Scattered symptoms assimilate into one resounding diagnosis.
This piece is also about how, when someone in your family suffers, you suffer just as much. Oh no, not because you love them and they love you (I won’t bore you with the obvious), but because the complexities of that relationship suddenly surface in ways previously undiagnosed. In early 2021, I wrote a piece titled Person Proposes, Divine Disposes. Four years later, I may be ready to write an even more difficult version.
This year, I had planned to write more. More is better is the universal refrain. More words, more often. In pursuit of more, I forever fall short. Thank god I made no public declaration of this plan. Am I relieved that there’s no one holding me accountable, even as I find myself facing circumstances that demand accountability like never before?
As I acquaint myself with fear and grief of an entirely new magnitude, faced with a situation I had long dreaded yet only ever imagined, I have no choice but to take it one day at a time. One word at a time. When I sit at my desk on days like today, the words hesitantly knock at my door. When I let them in, they splatter across the page, shapeless, formless, desultory like this “diary entry”.
Maybe all I ever needed to write was a quiet moment, this solitude contained by the assured presence of others. Maybe all I ever needed was a bigger problem, a bittersweet reminder that the smaller ones are indeed smaller. Maybe it's always been relative. Like I said when Covid first struck and the world cried woefully about uncertainty: Things were always uncertain. We just didn’t know it.
As an anxious person, if I say that I attempt to take it one day at a time, is that not victory of some kind? It’s okay that my essays on privacy in a collectivist society, on the perils of super-specialising in medicine, on the hollow heft of expertise, lie languidly, unattended in the drafts. They’re neglected, but not abandoned. For today, this is enough.
I'm tired of running around in circles, in thought and in action. This is my moment of rest. The real privilege isn’t a life devoid of suffering, but the comfort of a quiet moment like this one.
When there is no diagnosis, there is no talk of prognosis. You live as though you'll live forever. Your life isn't measured by prognostic parameters. You live through your suffering, yet you die by the diagnosis.
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P.S.: I am okay. Things are okay. Please be assured that this piece isn’t meant to evoke worry or invite questions. I am truly okay. Thank you for reading!
Richa there is a reason why i found this piece today when I for the first time thought of writing something on the same idea...with or without diagnosis, to be or not to be diagnosed that is really a big question for me .and I'm relieved to find another voice echoing some of those feelings
This is an interesting concept. I have never before feared a diagnosis but know people around me who relate to such feelings. I find it applies even more so to people who deep down know their diagnosis (or perhaps know the awful truth of prognosis).