touch me, i’m sick: a memoir in essays

all preorders receive an exclusive print by margeaux and a chance to win their coloring book. submit your receipt here.

Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another.The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care.

The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.

Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.

While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.

This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.

  • “In Touch Me, I’m Sick, Margeaux Feldman explores cultural responses to trauma and illness through a brilliant tapestry of research, criticism, and narrative. Drawing on feminist, queer, and disability justice lineages, Feldman not only astutely critiques the violence of capitalism and heteropatriarchy but—importantly—also imagines beyond it. At once impressively rigorous and deeply personal, Feldman’s gorgeous debut is a love letter and a guide toward radical care, healing, and belonging.”

    —Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme

  • “For every nonbinary babe and girl who ever felt too much, too unwell, too easily slotted into the role of the hysterical femme, let Touch Me, I’m Sick be your queer feminist guidebook and middle finger to Freud and all the bad patriarchs of Western psychology. An impeccably wise memoir that skillfully joins the heartbreaking lessons of author Margeaux Feldman’s life as a parentified child and constant caregiver with some of the most urgent conversations about disability justice, trauma studies, and pleasure activism happening today; they give us a manual for accepting the messiest parts of ourselves, however imperfect, excessive, and perpetually worthy of love.”

    —Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster

  • “Touch Me, I’m Sick is a highly potent text that works its spell on the reader within the rich intersections of queer studies, disability studies, literary theory, psychology, and various modes of healing work. Margeaux Feldman boldly asks us to ‘get slutty with our care’ and to consider the power of ‘soft magic’ while generously sharing stories from their life. What might happen if we ‘moved toward the call of touch me, i’m sick’? they ask. My answer: a revolution in how we approach healing from trauma. May this book find all its readers: the queer, the sick, the healers, and everyone in need of healing.”

    —Wendy C. Ortiz, psychotherapist and author of Excavation: A Memoir

  • "Tenderly written and courageously conceived, Margeaux Feldman's Touch Me, I'm Sick is a collection of essays that speaks deeply to readers on the levels of heart, head, and soul. Feldman gracefully interweaves intimate storytelling with deep intellectual analysis, spinning together the threads of personal narrative, disability justice, psychology and trauma theory, and transformative justice to make a unique contribution to the lineage of queer and trans cultural work. Readers yearning for a vision of social justice that holds complexity and nuance are sure to find refuge in Feldman's care-filled words. This book is medicine."

    - Kai Cheng Thom, author of I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes From the End of the World