This sick beat.

it's a joke haha get it… get it… because "beat" is a subject… oh never mind

Acacia tree in Ein Khadra Desert Oasis, Nuweibaa, South Sinai, Egypt. لا روسا via Wikimedia Commons.

For both professional and personal purposes, I read a lot of stuff about being sick. I would say a major aspect of these pieces is the announcement that “nobody tells you…” followed by something that’s in every piece of this nature. Not always literally in those words, but still: nobody tells you that doctors can be dismissive, nobody tells you that sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s wrong, nobody tells you about how people you think you can count on are unsympathetic. It’s a little like the way pieces about new parenthood tend to announce that nobody tells you parenthood will be hard. This is just about the only thing people tell you about parenthood.

I don’t know what this means exactly—that nobody reads these pieces except the already sick? That people read then with a silent “not me though” in their minds? That the assumption is if people were talking about this, it would be fi…