Time & Perspective Quote by Jane Roberts

Roberts slips a scalpel into the soft tissue where “health” stops being medical and turns psychological: identity. The line isn’t really about illness as biology; it’s about illness as narrative. Once a condition becomes “who I am,” it gains the stubbornness of a creed. Treating symptoms is hard enough, but trying to dislodge a self-concept is like arguing someone out of their autobiography.

The intent reads as preventative and quietly radical. She’s pushing the reader to intervene early, not only with doctors and habits, but with the stories we tell ourselves. “Accepted” is the pivot word: acceptance is usually praised as maturity, yet here it’s portrayed as a trapdoor. Roberts isn’t condemning realism or disability identity; she’s warning about the moment when adaptation curdles into resignation, when a diagnosis becomes a personality. The subtext is a critique of how people can become loyal to their suffering because it provides coherence, community, excuses, even a strange stability. Illness can function as protection from risk: if I’m “the sick one,” I’m spared certain expectations.

Context matters. Jane Roberts, best known for channeling the Seth material, wrote in a cultural moment hungry for mind-body explanations and suspicious of purely mechanistic medicine. Her phrasing echoes that era’s belief in the psychosomatic feedback loop: what the mind rehearses, the body often follows. Even if you reject the metaphysics, the rhetorical power holds. She reframes “cure” as a fight over identity formation. Catch the illness before it becomes selfhood, and you’re not just treating a condition - you’re preserving the possibility of being someone else.