[...] I woke up on January second, perhaps the dullest and most obligated day of the whole year, a living garbage pile topped by a discarded Christmas tree, and couldn’t breathe through my face. I went to the gym because I didn’t believe myself, and it took me nearly a week of dragging my body around the city, leaking and listing to the side like an old ship with a hole in it, to admit that I actually was sick. Surely I must be faking it. Surely I must want this, this excuse from class, this note that says I can stay home today, under the covers, with a mug of something warm, allowed to sit out this round of doing life, excused from getting up and walking myself to the next thing and the next. Surely I must want the sick day. And worse, some part of me did.

[...] A cold is really just being overworked and overextended, drinking too much and partying too much, generally not taking care of ourselves, the sneaky ways that depression manages to articulate itself as something more comprehensible. Because a cold is non-critical it feels, at least to me when I have one, like it has be about something other than itself, as though stuffed-up sinuses and a leaking face were just the container, just the form. The substance, the content, needs to be something else—not a cold, but an explanation. The cold must be about my flaws, my tendency to say yes to too many things, my eating habits, my laziness. Because a cold is so low-level as to not quite seem medical, it acts instead as a referendum on one’s whole lifestyle. We expect having a cold to have a thesis. There is so little to it that it has to somehow be more than itself.

[...] Colds are a referendum on how kind we can be to ourselves, how much we can let ourselves get away with, how small we can allow ourselves to be. They are also reminders of the large and overwhelming power of the systems that want us to be none of these things.

Every day there is some news story about someone who kept going to work through some horrible sickness, with a broken limb, through labor pains. We are supposed to find these stories inspiring. This particular tendency - to find the human willingness to break ourselves, the desperation that refuses kindness to one’s own body - to be somehow heroic, equated with both physical and moral strength, is not particular to our era. It is older and more insidious than that, deeper and harder to get at than the easy classification of millenial burnout. That burnout, or whatever name you want to give it, is real, but it is part of a vast and ancient idea that by destroying ourselves, by using ourselves up, we become holy and virtuous, guaranteed moral clarity, free from possible accusations of selfishness, clean as a bone and bathed in light. It is silly to think that there is nothing that does not reach back to an old and creaking and claw-fingered religion in our belief in the redemptive beauty of bearing up under suffering, of working through the pain.