Or to Mom. And Grandma. When there are so many lies, though, where do you begin?

I’ve never gotten better. I’ve just gotten better at hiding the truth. Grandma and Mom always do their best to support my choices—track and field, pre-law, nursing school—but they wouldn’t have if I had been honest with them.

And Ash…Ash, who has told me I’m too thin, who has said he’s worried I don’t eat enough—I have told him so many lies. I’m just like this, I say: I have a quick metabolism. And I ate such a huge breakfast. Or a late lunch after my lecture. He drops it quickly, like it scalds his tongue. Men are so careful when speaking to women about their weight. Even doctors and therapists, male ones. They realise how much is tied up in their gaze.

In the hospital stays, at my lowest points, it was never the doctors or the therapists whose approval I wanted; it was the nurses. They took one look at me and brought extra blankets, the ones which are starched, and bleached as white as Miss America’s teeth. They didn’t ask stupid questions. They were straightforward and strong; solid with steady hands. They put in IVs and watched me go to the bathroom after meals, they watched me swallow my meds and held my wrist to count my pulse. They knew the business of bodies better than anyone. Better than the doctors, who fumbled over charts and tests and long-term plans. Better than therapists, who asked questions and sat through interminable silences. Nurses counted pills and pounds and heartbeats; they seemed to know when to speak and when to stay silent.

They weren’t all like this, of course; there were the ones who sighed at a bedpan, who flinched when they saw the outline of your bones, who asked things like, ‘Don’t you want to have babies one day?’

But the good ones were really good. Some even looked at you with something like admiration. A nurse is a person who admires self-control. Who doesn’t take shit from anyone, but feels sympathy for everyone, because don’t we all suffer? Isn’t it part of being alive?

In nursing school we learned this: how physical pain takes over, how we forget things quicker in pain and how our brains can be tricked by it. It’s why you can distract yourself from something which really hurts with just a pinch.