"Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke"
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The quiet brutality here is in the mismatch between a benign-sounding label and a life-altering reality. Hillenbrand is talking about chronic illness as a branding problem with consequences: the name becomes the story, and if the story sounds mild, the suffering gets filed under attitude, not anatomy. Her phrasing turns that cultural reflex into a procedural injustice. "Most people... it's all they know" is an indictment of how we outsource empathy to terminology; a diagnosis becomes trivia, not testimony.
She compresses a decade of medical and social gaslighting into a few blunt verbs: dismissed, ridiculed, told. The repetition matters. It mimics the grind of being assessed again and again by people who feel licensed to judge because they cannot see evidence that satisfies them. "For the first 10 years or so" lands like a sentence, not a time span: long enough for an identity to be rewritten by outsiders. You start as a patient and get recast as a moral failure.
"It was a joke" is the hardest line because it reveals the social function of mockery. Ridicule isn't just cruelty; it's a community's way of restoring order when someone's reality breaks the script. If illness doesn't look dramatic, we demand performance or we deny it exists. Coming from a celebrated author whose work depends on meticulous credibility, the subtext sharpens: even unimpeachable narrators can be disbelieved when the culture prefers tidy explanations to messy, chronic truth.
She compresses a decade of medical and social gaslighting into a few blunt verbs: dismissed, ridiculed, told. The repetition matters. It mimics the grind of being assessed again and again by people who feel licensed to judge because they cannot see evidence that satisfies them. "For the first 10 years or so" lands like a sentence, not a time span: long enough for an identity to be rewritten by outsiders. You start as a patient and get recast as a moral failure.
"It was a joke" is the hardest line because it reveals the social function of mockery. Ridicule isn't just cruelty; it's a community's way of restoring order when someone's reality breaks the script. If illness doesn't look dramatic, we demand performance or we deny it exists. Coming from a celebrated author whose work depends on meticulous credibility, the subtext sharpens: even unimpeachable narrators can be disbelieved when the culture prefers tidy explanations to messy, chronic truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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