I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

Much has been said about the meanings we make of illness, but what about the meanings we make out of cure? Cure is complex, disorienting, a revisioning of the self, either subtle or stark. Cure is the new, strange planet, pressing in. The doctor could not have known. And that made me, as it does every patient, only more alone.

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world.

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane.