How My Body Spoke to Me in Sickness
I was convinced that I could handle it all—including healing myself.
the
Today I feel raw and drained and lowLife remains wonderful and I feel safe within myself
I must get betterBut I feel sad, want to sink into the ground, want to be swallowed by something, and yet and yet and yet I don’t want to make anyone else sad, I just want to get better, or maybe the issue is that I don’t know what vision of a future I’m looking for.
absurd
Aisha Hassan is a Malaysian writer and entrepreneur. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in publications such as Quartz, Harper's Bazaar Malaysia, Barren Magazine, and XRAY Literary Magazine. She is the co-founder of Dia Guild, an e-commerce platform that supports artisanship, and also works for a charitable foundation in Malaysia. She has a BA in English Language & Literature from the University of Oxford and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @aishabhassan.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Aisha Hassan
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Aisha Hassan
More in this series
How Did Vicks VapoRub Become Every Brown Person’s Cure-All?
Maybe these home remedies aren’t just tricks or distractions. Maybe they are insistences on our well-being.
How Heaux Tales Taught Me to Shed Shame
Like Jazmine Sullivan’s “The Other Side,” a song from her latest EP, Heaux Tales, I saw a life outside the confines of conservatism—the length of my skirt and the policing of what I was allowed to say and do.
Finding a Face for My Invisible Illness
I could only acknowledge my thyroid condition from sly, sideways angles—a hobbit stealing from a sleeping dragon’s hoard.