She measured everything about her illness. The measuring turned out to be part of what kept her sick.
Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York, and one of the few people alive who can take raw data and turn it into something you understand in your bones and feel in your body. In 2020, a mild COVID infection set off four years of long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, mast cell activation, and a level of disability that left her housebound, out of work, and eating eight foods for an entire year.
Giorgia did what she does. She tracked every symptom, every test, every prognosis, and limitation. Then she published 1,374 Days, a visual op-ed in the New York Times built from her own symptom data, and readers with chronic illness wrote to say it was the first thing they could hand to the people who loved them.
That, however, was just the beginning of a story of recovery that was about to take a wild, transformative turn. One that would find her rethinking her approach to measuring what was wrong and shifting to the opposite, realizing, all too often, that what we measure reinforces our reality.
In this conversation, you'll explore:
A note on how we held this one. Giorgia is careful, and so are we. This is her story and not a protocol, her symptoms were real, documented in labs, and measurable, and nobody in this conversation is suggesting anyone thinks their way out of illness.
If you have ever looked fine from the outside while something underneath was quietly giving way, this is a conversation about what your body might be trying to tell you before it has to shout.
You can find Giorgia at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
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