I spent the final stretch of high school sick, depressed, and underperforming in college acceptances. What I really wanted was to disappear entirely, but the concerned phone calls my school placed to my mother about my weight ensured that there would be no such reprieve granted to me. I went through the motions. I stopped wearing black, which I was told emphasized my pale complexion and made me look sickly. I studied makeup tutorials to learn how to appear more awake and alive, in a way I hoped was not obvious, because I believed that complicity in my own oppression was in poor taste. I clipped wefts of hair extensions onto my head to fill out my hair where illness and nutritional deficiencies had thinned it. I felt that if I didn’t capture some image of health for myself, even one that was the result of concealed labor, I might soon be unable to conjure one. (“Everything in her,” wrote Bourneville about Augustine, “announces the hysteric. The care that she takes in her toilette; the styling of her hair, the ribbons she likes to adorn herself with.”) I did not keep many photos from that time, and my journal entries faded from a cacophony of questions, ideas, and quotes copied from novels to the occasional entry of symptoms. Graduating seniors were shown a video urging us to be vaccinated for meningitis, lest we perish to meningococcal disease in the college dorms; I remember thinking I already frequently experienced most of the symptoms of meningitis. I tried to escape the dullness of my destiny—an enduring illness and no reason to anticipate diagnosis; a declining ability to focus on reading, my life’s other source of intensity since young childhood and the source of most of my knowledge about the world—by focusing on the experiences I believed to have been stolen from me that I might soon aggressively pursue: learning to cook, reading bad poetry, writing worse poetry, drinking all I could, falling in love with men and women, listening to Bach and Wagner as loud as I wanted without anyone to tell me to turn it down. I moved to an apartment, which was cheaper and quieter than a dorm. While the kind of romantic delusion I craved might make a fitting motivation for a fictional heroine, at university, I settled into life as a young woman in mourning for her body. My peers struck me as unromantic, utilitarian: eating, drinking, sleeping, fucking. In my eyes, they used their health for nothing. No one tried to do anything with unusual grace or rigor. I wondered if they could possibly understand what it was like to have the body as a vessel attacked by itself. Attacked. Writing the word feels false—or true only insofar as I can find no better alternative. Dualism plagues everything. Yet, I did, and do, feel isolated from my body, from my faculties—where is that “I” located? The self that observes its own illness for a prolonged period of time is vulnerable to that mind-body split. When I was able to think clearly, I felt that my body had betrayed me and was running the course of illness while my mind remained intact.

I had no desire to teach dance. It was too much a reminder of what I could no longer do, and I hated the children—their knobby knees and bad turnout, their lightness, the way they moved through the world expecting their lives to amount to more than accidents and unexplained events. I chose to try modeling, which struck me as more discreet than acting. In some ways, the casting process felt akin to the medical one. Girls would stand in a line of more than fifty before being called in, one by one, to walk the length of a runway in high heels before a casting director, who might or might not choose to examine the bound folio of the girl’s previous work: digital headshots, torn-out magazine pages, commercial stills, overexposed high-flash runway shots by party photographers; her clothing size and bust, waist, and hip measurements on a card. The director usually took simple digital photos of us holding a sheet of printer paper featuring our name and agency and might ask for some very basic biographical information. The entire process took only a few minutes. All that mattered was how you showed up in the photos and if you’d fit in the clothes. A casting only occasionally yielded a job. The pay was usually pitiful and seemed inversely correlated with the perceived prestige. Each time I booked a stint modeling clothing that cost many thousands of dollars more than I would be paid, I wondered about the extent to which my success had come from my inability to keep food down. My agent told me that whatever I was doing was working and not to change a goddamn thing. I told her not to worry: There was nothing I could change. I would continue to look, by the industry standard of heroin chic from back in the 1990s, quite all right.

I wondered if Augustine ever got to see her images, if she was able to practice, make adjustments, before she once again stepped in front of the camera to return to herself—if she considered herself to be making a record or a portfolio, like our modeling books. Or—as her body was never photographed straight on, except when she was in a state of hypnosis—was she unrecognizable to herself? Did it seem that it was some other patient, or a dead relative, looking back at her? Maybe she experienced her photographs as an argument, as I did: No, those are my eyes. My sinking cheekbones. She must have known that to be the star hysteric of the hospital, she didn’t actually need to be the most beautiful or photogenic or charismatic, but rather, a blank slate to invite projection. You can see more, I’d repeat to myself in the makeup artist’s chair, like a chant. You can see more through less of me. A skinny girl on a runway is really just a clothes hanger; a skinny girl in a print ad is a nothingness onto which the client can project any image, and it will appear cohesive, logical. Any rupture or return of myself threatened that cohesion: at a runway show in the cathedral turned event venue downtown, sold by the diocese after the 1994 earthquake, I was queasy and could not think of all the Communions—breaking, eating the body—that had happened there. The walls were still lined with confessionals; sloppy drunks pawed at one another, stumbled in and out. I was fitted into a cocktail dress in the former priest’s quarters, a room nestled behind the altar. A drop of blood formed by a pin prick on my back; a red cocktail was thrust into my hand; lines of cocaine were passed around on an iPhone screen, a rare gesture of sisterhood among models. Were the women of the Salpêtrière competitive, or did they find solace in their shared community? There is so little documentation of the hysterics’ relationships with one another, and they seem to pose alone. In any case, we models needed to sufficiently loosen ourselves before making the viscous, Clydesdale walk down the runway and vanishing into the whiteness of the flashbulb. Did Augustine have something—a thimble of wine, maybe—that would allow her to assemble her gestures, take in the scene, arrange her outfit? Could she see her reflection in a mirror before being photographed? In an engraving of the hospital’s photographic setup in La Nature in 1883, the subject sits upon a solitary bed in a sparsely furnished room gazing at the man who is operating the camera—he does not appear to be visually taking an account of her at all. How did Augustine turn these things into a single image that is not the darkroom and the hospital gown and the lighting but, somehow, the effigy of a sick girl? Did she need to make this visual catalogue to contain her symptoms in order to overcome the shame, the boredom of talking about herself?

Perhaps there was nothing Augustine could change about herself; she was doomed to recidivism, eternally returning to the studio in order to take her symptoms, her wayward body, her humiliation, her powerlessness, and mold them into a shape of her own. Or perhaps Charcot told her not to change a goddamn thing, and she was left with the same understanding I was now arriving at: that our bodies are objects managed by forces much larger than ourselves.

Things got worse when I started to smell things. Something burning in the middle of the night, coming from nowhere. Rotting meat, from inside me. I wondered if anyone else could smell me, if I was decaying, dead on earth. I would make a cup of tea, light a candle, take a Xanax. In the night, I smelled burning flesh (though I had no reason to know what burning human flesh might smell like) and woke up in fevered sweats. I began to divide my symptoms into two categories: things I would tell a doctor and things I would not.

Writing, I decided, was something I could do without a face. The kind of bold certainty with which I approached my intelligence and my ability looks shockingly entitled in hindsight, but it was also the first practical decision I’d made for myself. One can write from bed.

Most mornings, I have a painkiller before coffee. Others, I can’t get out of bed. In some ways, I have already fulfilled my fear of becoming that Balanchine teacher with the cultish glaze in her eye. I just skipped the career, the glory days.