Being (Sick) Enough
Thoughts on Invisible Illness, Childhood Trauma, and Living Well When Surviving Is Hard
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Wise, visceral essays on navigating pain, sex, trauma, spirituality, addiction, recovery, and grief from queer, neurodivergent trauma-resolution guide Jessica Graham
In an unapologetic look at living well with trauma and chronic illness, writer and meditation teacher Jessica Graham offers smart, funny, raw, and mindful insights on untangling—and embracing—the messy realities of being a human alive on this planet today.
Graham gives us permission to accept care—and accept that it’s okay to want care. They weave together personal stories and practical wisdom, offering their take on managing symptoms, getting creative, setting boundaries, and healing from ableist tropes like “you don’t look sick” and “we’re all a little ADHD.”
Graham also shares vulnerable personal history: The adverse childhood experiences that wired their body and brain. The workaholism and addictions that kept their pain lying just below the surface. How illness and trauma intersect to obscure the knowledge that we’re each enough, wholly as we are.
This memoir explores the parts of chronic illness life that don’t get enough airtime: How can we center sex and pleasure when pain gets in the way? How can we live well while living through late-stage capitalist hell? How can we come into relationship with our pain without falling prey to self-blame, magical thinking, or toxic positivity?
Wise and embodied, fearless and necessary, Being (Sick) Enough is both a wild awakening and a love letter to your whole self: the pains and suffering, joys and brightness, and vital connections that hold each of us as we navigate what it means to be here, like this, right now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this hit-or-miss memoir-in-essays, Graham (Good Sex) reflects on their complicated relationship with their body, former partners, and parents. "Trauma can seep deep into our DNA, twisting and contorting the genes that dictate how our bodies respond to stress and hardship," Graham writes, tracing their alcoholism and PTSD to their father's drinking, their mother's physical abuse, and the sexual assault they experienced at the hands of various men throughout their life. Exploring how trauma influences chronic illness, Graham recounts how an "emotionally, physically, and spiritually devastating" long-term relationship triggered fibromyalgia and chronic gastritis flare-ups so severe they ended up in the hospital. The author contends that such traumas can be resolved, discussing how "mindfulness meditation gave me a way to move through suffering, instead of trying to escape from it." For good and ill, the selections feel like sitting in on Graham's therapy sessions, offering perceptive if clinical analyses of the author's psychology, but yielding few insights about what it's like to experience chronic illness and trauma. So intimate it veers on solipsistic, this falls short.
