Jonathan Franzen Quote

That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, Just know that those thoughts aren’t you. That’s the OCD, it’s not you. It was a kind gesture—she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening in my brain was not of me but outside me, happening to me. That there was a tidy line dividing me from disease, and the disease was classifiable as other. But then it became difficult to tell whether certain thoughts should go in the me box or the disease box—where did I want to throw a rock through the kitchen window belong? Eventually I could no longer avoid the fact that mental illness is not like infection; there’s no outside invader. And if a disease is produced in your body, in your mind, then what is it if not you?