Voices
SASHA
BRONNER
HUFFINGTON
02.09.14
SASHA BRONNER
What I
Learned
Spending
5 Days in
Silence
THE HARDEST PART of living
with an undiagnosed and often
difficult to manage immune disorder is the war it has waged between my mind and my body.
What started as a small rash of
hives at age 22 slowly blossomed
into a dark and prickly garden
of endless referrals, specialists,
misdiagnoses, pills, needles, IVs,
full-body scans and more questions than answers.
Six years of feeling like my body
had turned against me created a
separation within myself that is
hard to pinpoint. It’s sort of like
having a dollhouse inside your body
and closing off three rooms because
there are bad things inside of them.
I got used to walking around
that house, but it was unsettling to
see the rooms sealed off — knowing that at any moment, or on any
morning, those doors could be
blown wide open, and I would wake
up with welts all over my body or
crippling shooting pain in my knees
or such deep exhaustion that I
sometimes couldn’t get out of bed.
The list of doctors in my phone
The cliffs of
Big Sur seen
from one of
the walking
paths at
the Esalen
Institute.