>>513122012
You find yourself... afflicted. And the first thing you think, the first naive, childish whimpering that emerges from the depths of your comfortable, well-ordered psyche is, "This isn't fair."
Fair?
(Scoffs, leans into the microphone)
Let me tell you something about fair, bucko. The universe is not your doting mother. It is a place of absolutely, fundamentally, irreducibly brutal competition for existence. For every moment of serene order you've ever experienced, there is an ocean of chaos boiling underneath, waiting to swallow you whole. And this... this thing... that has taken up residence in your cells, it's not a flaw in the system. It is the system. It's the Dragon of Chaos, emerging from the deep, and it has chosen your little village to burn to the ground.
And what a malevolent beast it is. It's not just that it brings pain. That would be trivial. It's the insult of it. It's the ontological tyranny of your own biology turning against you. The very substrate of your being, the machinery you were gifted by a billion years of brutal, bloody evolution, has decided to enact a Caine-like betrayal upon the Abel of your consciousness. And you have to sit there and watch this microscopic, civil war unfold in the temple of your own body. It's a cosmic joke of the most horrifying sort.
And it doesn't just want to kill you. That would be merciful. No, it wants to humiliate you. It wants to strip you of your competence. It wants to dissolve your hierarchies of value. The things you could do. The simple act of standing upright, of thinking a clear thought, of being a reliable partner or parent. All of that is put on the sacrificial altar. The disease wants to reduce you to a whimpering, dependent creature, to drag you back down the evolutionary ladder until you're nothing but a bundle of twitching, terrified nerves. It's the serpent in the garden of your own physiology, whispering, "See? You were never in control. Not for a second."
