They’ll be even more pissed off when they find out I’ve gotten LP shit from good ol Goodwill for a whopping $5.89

Waiting in line to buy a lifestyle good is inherently an amusing proposition. I’m not going to knock it or say people shouldn’t do it — I feel like most people have a good memory about camping out for tickets etc., and I’ve definitely come early to gear swap lines with two cups of coffee to buoy me through. But you…

I don’t mean to offend anyone but I always thought it was a wasp thing.

The best fiance in the world (mine) joined me at Target at 7:45 am and grabbed a set of those mugs for me.

She did divorce! The idiot moved near their old house with his new family tough so she runs into him from time to time. I have never seen him again and that is good because if I did I would surely want to beat him up.

The dog’s body language is totally “Chase me! Chase me! What’s wrong with this puppy? Its eyes have opened, it should be ready to play!”

A dude with 44 Dunkin’ Donuts franchises wants a little more cash?

It is ok now. I had to go all around the neighborhood shops, like say, dry cleaaner’s, going “Hi, did I drop anything off here? Cause I was in a coma and forgot”, and people don’t think you literally mean coma and just laugh.

*sniff* I want that for her / us too!!

Nothing could be more appropriate than replacing Jackson with a Cherokee woman. Absolutely nothing.

During a recent transaction, an elderly woman handed me a twenty and said, with eyes a’twinklin’ “Did you hear they might put a woman on the 20 dollar bill? I’d love to see that before I go...” And then we both melted into a puddle of feelings.

I kinda don’t even want to talk about this, but I feel like I have a responsibility to if anyone out there who might be like me and might read this.

When I graduated college, my mom's wacky elderly German friend mailed me a box of those with the note "I know you'll know exactly what to do with these." I had never heard of them before and I WAS SO DESPERATELY CONFUSED.

As Sylvia Plath put it in The Bell Jar: I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head.

This. There’s no place for dualism in modern medicine. We know severe psychological problems aren’t the result of some metaphysical, spiritual illness and it’s high time the culture drops this pretense that a faulty brain is categorically different than a faulty heart. It’s one thing for laypeople to hold onto the…

My aunt “has” Morgellons. I “had” something similar in 2010. I was obsessed with ingrown hairs, to the point that I believed I had almost twice as much hair as I actually had, but it was ‘trapped’ under the skin of my scalp and therefore I had to free it with my fingernails. I waxed all the skin off my chin because I…

Great post. I can attest to how the disbelief of others that your pain is real can amplify the pain you experience. (My ob/gyn didn’t believe me about my endometriosis pain for a while, and it slapped a nice thick layer of desperation on top of the already intolerable pain. I was, in fact, hysterical about it.) Also,…

Thank you for this well-written and fascinating article. Morgellons and other non-real diseases always sounded to me like cries for help and, as NonServiam pointed out, part of our culture’s dismissal of mental illnesses as real. But your comments about the reality of pain struck a chord.

"Disease has always had a hierarchy. To suffer from a rare disorder that has been definitively traced to a biological origin is preferable to being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. One patient suffers heroically, the other is simply insane."

I was surprised this piece didn't reference Leslie Jamison's excellent essay on Morgellons for her book The Empathy Exams (published in Harper's first): http://harpers.org/archive/2013/0…