"To most people around me, I was simply small, dramatic, and usually sick. In some sense, the knowledge was always there -that the thing that was wrong with me might have a name, that it might be wrong with other people, too.
What was the point? I was skeptical of tidy diagnostic categorization even as I sought it. The issue is not that diagnostic categories are fake -or that 'psychological' as opposed to 'somatic' suffering is somehow less real- but that they are means to the end of accessing care, not ends in themselves. I didn’t care what the name for my collection of symptoms might be, but I really, desperately wanted to stop fainting, to keep food down, to maintain a normal body temperature.
I would come to think of the diagnostic process as a devil's bargain the sick must make with the market in order to receive the care necessary to survive."
