Love & Passion Quote by Laura Hillenbrand

The line lands like a rebuke, not a plea: Hillenbrand isn’t describing discomfort, she’s prosecuting a language crime. “Fatigue” is the kind of word people use to keep moving, to turn someone else’s crisis into background noise. By calling it a “gross misnomer,” she targets the social reflex to domesticate illness with a mild label, the way “burnout” can stand in for collapse or “stress” can blur into disability. Her intent is corrective and strategic: if the public can be made to hear the wrongness of the word, they might finally see the wrongness of the dismissal that follows it.

The specificity is doing the heavy lifting. “Couldn’t roll over in bed” is humiliatingly concrete; it drags the listener into the physics of incapacity. “I couldn’t speak” escalates from the everyday to the existential: the body not only fails, it silences. Hillenbrand’s short, blunt sentences mimic the experience she’s naming - reduced bandwidth, no room for ornament - while also refusing the inspirational arc people often demand from sick bodies.

Context matters: Hillenbrand has long been public about living with ME/CFS, a condition routinely minimized in medicine and culture, especially when it skews female and invisible. The subtext is clear: misnaming is misdiagnosis, and misdiagnosis is policy. If society insists it’s “just fatigue,” it can justify inadequate research funding, skeptical doctors, and friends who treat incapacitation as mood. She’s fighting for a vocabulary that carries consequence.