Philadelphia Weekly

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My freshman year at Oberlin College, I was possessed by anxiety for an entire year, wondering if I'd be popular or happy or desirable or smart. This was fueled by a realization I'd had on Day One: The very things that set me apart in high school were, it turned out, strikingly banal.

Here, everyone was smart, though not first-in-the-class smart. Everyone was on the periphery of popularity in high school-too quirky to truly fit in. Everyone came from a liberal home with parents who had money but pretended they didn't. Everyone was uncool, but in a cool kind of way. No homecoming queens or football heroes here.

The only thing that made me unique, it seemed, in this bunch of jittery, displaced coastal teenagers, was having grown up with a striking variety of physical illnesses. An undiagnosed autoimmune disorder caused everything from joint pain to sensitivity to the cold to digestive problems to asthma. So when I met Gregg Weinberg, who would become my first College Boyfriend to merit caps, I believed we were meant for each other. Weinberg, too, was "ill." He suffered from Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), which inhibits the body's production of platelets. He was incredibly smart, the funniest person I had ever met and he was very, very sickly. Soon, we were spending all our time together, hiding out in his dorm room and having sex with George Winston's "Winter Into Spring" plunking along in the background.

Gregg recalls those romance-filled days: "Both of us had psychological issues about illness that shaped who we were. I was constantly monitoring my physical condition and I had Tourette's at the same time. I was completely out of control with my body. I felt a tremendous amount of isolation. But you and I, we were both sickies. It was kind of nice to meet someone who had survived the war-torn battlefield of medicine."

Once, we had a huge fight because I wanted Gregg to get a chest X-ray. I said, "I can't believe you won't do this for me." Those were the terms. On one particularly revealing Greyhound bus ride, watching the snowy cornfields of Ohio out the window, we invented The Question: If you could be well tomorrow-cured-would you do it? At the time, we both said no.

In thinking about this column, I remembered that bus ride and my own stubborn identification with illness. There was a part of me-first with Gregg, then later in relation to my mental illness-that was afraid to be well, or even half-well. First of all, it could crumble at any time; the only way was down. Second, it compromised my singularity.

On the other hand, I didn't want to be sick forever. That gets pretty limiting. Luckily, I never had to make a decision either way: Having this column affords me a strange sort of privilege, allowing me to preserve my "sick" self without having to forfeit the "well."

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I couldn't stop thinking about that bus ride, though, and its striking similarity to letters I've received. So I called Gregg and asked if he remembered it.

"I think through college and even after college, that was the only way I could really identify myself: as a sick person," he said. "At the time of that bus ride, I couldn't fathom waking up and not being ill. Think of the repercussions: If I woke up tomorrow [not sick], what would I do? In a classical sense, when you're sick, you gain certain liberties and exclusions and exceptions. It became a genuine excuse not to truly live my life.

"Now, I live differently. If someone asked me now, �Do you want to be cured?' I think I would categorically say yes. But when we were on that bus, I had a sense that I would be losing my identity if I said yes."

Does the difference in Gregg's attitude mean his health has improved? "No, in reality, the disease itself has become worse. I had my spleen removed. I've had a series of hospitalizations and platelet crises, whether it was chemotherapy or steroids. It hasn't become less worrisome, but ... you almost separate from it. The years leading up to grad school, me and the illness were one and the same. Now there's me-and an illness."

There's something to be said for that separation. I think it's what makes recovery from any kind of serious illness possible. To reader Maureen Vernon, though, it's not so simple. She puts it quite eloquently: "I'm not well. I'm not sick. I'm just here in this limbo. Just this place located between life and death. I am a black-and-white thinker: Things are good or bad; right or wrong; strong or weak ... To be here [in limbo], therefore, is not fun. At least being sick is dependable, comfortable, familiar, friendly, known. ... Health crashes with the known, the familiar ... So where do you go when no choice is right and no direction is safe?"

I don't know the answer to that exactly, even though this is the so-called final chapter in this series. What if you choose the phrase "in recovery" and try to cut yourself from newish cloth? Frankly, I don't know what else to do.