Eva Hagberg Fisher, «How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship»: I took so many pictures of myself then, and later—selfies about to fall asleep, selfies about to get out of bed. I didn’t post all of the pictures, but I took hundreds. I wanted to document what was happening, save it for later. To tell myself that there would be a later. I wanted to see myself reflected back to me. I wanted to know what I looked like now, in case I never looked like this again. In case the surgeon’s knife slipped. In case I was thrown straight into eighteen months of chemotherapy. In case my brain needed to be radiated; in case the person I had begun stitching together in the years since I’d stopped drinking disappeared. One morning, I took a picture and then looked at my eyes, my nose, my eyebrows. It wasn’t the same as seeing a reflection. In college, I’d looked at myself in the mirror some nights, trying to find myself in my eyes. “You’re here, you’re here, look at you,” I’d whispered to myself, my nose dripping from cocaine, my throat raw from throwing up the ninth shot I’d taken. But here, looking at a picture of myself on my phone, I felt more present. Presence was all I had. I couldn’t do anything for anyone. I couldn’t write, couldn’t work. I couldn’t teach. I couldn’t help anyone. I couldn’t follow the rules of reciprocity; I could only take. How to know that I existed? How to know that I mattered? Of course I had read articles that said that just being was enough. Of course someone had slipped me a Pema Chödrön book. Of course a therapist in New York had tried to convince me that what I saw as the perils of an ordinary life, something I was loath to even consider, were not in fact the pools of quicksand I believed they were. But here, now, all I could do was wait. Wait for pain, and what I was sure would be bad news. And so, click. A picture. I exist. Click. I exist. Those are my eyes. That’s my nose. That’s my mouth, with its right-sided curve. Some of the pictures were just for me. Some were also for me, but in a different way. When I posted the pictures online, it was so that everyone else could remind me that I was still here. Could give me permission to feel the blank terror that permeated every breath. See me, I wanted to say. See how afraid I am. I believed I couldn’t say that. The pull of the narrative that I was tough, and strong, and would get past this felt more powerful than the real story, the one that I felt building underneath, the one that felt more true. That I might not be as tough as I’d always thought. That I might not be as strong as my friends wanted to tell me I was. That I might not get past this. See me. See me. I am so afraid.