In Flames
Three Generations, One Biology, and the End of Broken
Someone you love is on fire right now — and almost everything you have been told about how they are suffering is probably wrong. What you are calling sadness, or anxiety, or just how I am, is not happening in some unreachable place called the soul. It is happening in a body. It is measurable. And for the first time in human history, we can see it.
The fire has a name now
For all of human history the thing that hollows people out has been invisible. So we called it weakness. In Flames is the story of what it actually is — told through three generations of one family, and through the blood work that finally made it visible.
What I was actually doing wasn't watching my son play basketball. I was working out how the barrel would feel against my teeth.
What was loose in me in those bleachers was not a defect in my character or my faith or my nerve. It was my biology.
The fuel is what happened to a person. It does not have to be a war; it can be a car crash, or a fist, or twenty years of a home devoid of love. The fuel catches, and the body does the thing almost no one is talking about: it sets itself alight.
Inflammation. The immune system turning against its owner. It wreaks havoc in the body, then crosses slowly into the brain, where we have spent a century giving it other names — depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD. As if we were describing the smoke and not the flame.
The moment it stops being an invisible shame and becomes a measurable, physical process, it stops being a life sentence. A shame is something you carry alone in the dark. A fire is something you can find, and fight, and put out.
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