Chronic Illness Taught Me to Redefine ‘Progress’

After years of frustration, I’m taking control in spite of my health

Jean-Luc Bouchard
Human Parts
Published in
4 min readOct 9, 2019

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Photo: Olaf Michalak/EyeEm/Getty Images

Chronic illness, for a while, broke my brain.

I say that not to reduce mental health to something glib and dramatic, but to accurately report how it felt to finally break under the weight of being permanently sick. The whole of my adult life…

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Jean-Luc Bouchard
Human Parts

Bylines in Vox, VICE, The Paris Review, BuzzFeed, and more. Contributor to The Onion. Check out my work here: jeanlucbouchard.com.