Life & Wisdom Quote by Jessamyn West

Illness, in West's framing, isn't just pain or inconvenience; it's exile. The sting of the line is in its quiet absolutism: "soon", "different world", "cannot". She's describing a fast education in estrangement, the way sickness reorganizes reality until the rules of ordinary life - time, energy, appetite, patience, even language - stop matching up with the expectations of the well. "World" does heavy lifting here. It's not metaphorical flourish so much as a claim that illness creates its own geography: appointments, symptoms, side effects, relapses, the constant mental arithmetic of risk and endurance.

The subtext is an indictment of the "well" as much as a lament for the sick. West doesn't say the two choose not to communicate; she says they can't. That lands like a critique of empathy's limits, and of a culture that treats health as the default setting and sickness as a temporary glitch. When you're ill, you learn how quickly conversations get rerouted into pep talks, productivity advice, or moral fables about resilience. The well want narratives that restore order. The sick live inside uncertainty and constraint.

Context matters: West wrote in a 20th-century America where chronic illness and disability were commonly privatized, euphemized, or folded into stoic domesticity. Her sentence refuses that tidiness. It's not sentimental; it's diagnostic. The power comes from how she makes miscommunication structural, not personal - a gulf built into how "normal life" is designed, and who it expects to be speaking.