I looked over at the man sitting next to me-a novelist I’d known for years-and realized that I had no idea who he was. One chilly December night in 2012, I drove a few colleagues back to Brooklyn after our department holiday party in New Jersey. I looked over at the man sitting next to me-a novelist I’d known for years-and realized I had no idea who he was. Yet some part of me thought that perhaps this was what everyone in her mid-30s felt.

Teaching a poetry class at Princeton, I found myself talking to the students about “the season that comes after winter, when flowers grow.” I was in near-constant pain, as I wrote in an essay for The New Yorker at the time about living with chronic illness. Recalling basic words was often challenging. Yet despite eating carefully and sleeping well, I was having difficulty functioning, which didn’t make sense to my doctor-or to me. In 2012, I was diagnosed with a relatively mild autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Nothing was really wrong, the doctors I visited told me my tests looked fine.

In 2008, when I was 32, doctors identified arthritis in my hips and neck, for which I had surgery and physical therapy. A doctor I consulted thought, based on a test result, that I might have lupus, but I had few other markers of the autoimmune disease. In 2002, I began waking up every night drenched in sweat, with hives covering my legs. Over the years, the shocks and other strange symptoms-vertigo, fatigue, joint pain, memory problems, tremors-came and went.

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