I didn’t look like the kind of girl you write poems about - the “angelic sick girl” trope that flooded Tumblr in 2013. I looked like someone you pity in waiting rooms.
I started this year in the hospital, struggling to breathe and longing to eat even when I couldn’t. I was diagnosed with advanced stage pneumonia due to stress and inadequate nutrition.
Before my diagnosis, we thought it was just a normal fever and tried to self-medicate at home. This dragged on for a week. Those days were the worst, I was burning up and my throat was closing in, my lungs felt heavy like I’d stuffed it with lead and stitched it back up.
The sickness grew stronger, stripping me down to my most primal self. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t even cry. There was only a dull ache in my chest and a single, burning desire – to be alive.
Everything else fell away. I wasn’t sad, or poetic, or mysterious. I was a body fighting to stay here, just instinct.
I was admitted to the hospital immediately once I was diagnosed.
My parents dropped everything. Work, schedules, sleep - to stay by my side. I barely had the strength to speak, but I remember the way mumma held up food to my lips like it was sacred. Papa argued with doctors until they listened. My heart clenches when I remember how they held me while I fell apart.
My hospital room overlooked Metro Wholesale. They were putting up a new nameplate, and I watched the workers paint it for days. As the sign slowly came together in bright yellow and blue, something inside me began shifting too.
As my body healed, it forced my mind to slow down. I looked at my arms - pierced with IVs, swollen, aching and bleeding, and realized how much it was enduring, after all the cruelty I’d shown it. My skin clung to my bones in ways I used to wish it did. My collarbones stood out just the right way. But all I felt was shame and disgust.
The pictures were everywhere growing up - lean and pretty girls with their hip bones, thigh gaps and mascara running down their sharp, magnetic faces. Lana Del Rey’s lyrics in delicate cursive writing over grainy filters. These images are seared into my brain. Years of romanticising pain, mental illness and angst, nursing it like it was the most precious part of my identity that glamorized self-destruction and the beauty in pain and sadness. I was sick of it. The ideals I’d held my body to came with a cost I was no longer sure I could bear.
Over a decade later and the internet is still the same. The Tumblr-era fragility of femininity is now memeified and rebranded as “rotting in bed”, “doomscrolling” or “mentally unstable baddie.” Same sickness, new filters.
It’s terrifying how the media we consume can crawl into our skin and make home in our bones. When I was discharged from the hospital and weighed myself, I had reached my goal weight. I was skinny enough to look like the girls in those pictures. Perfectly pretty and fragile.
I remember when my sister first saw me in my weakened state and broke down. This was not pretty, it wasn’t romantic or aesthetic. I had betrayed my body in the quest to achieve a fleeting vision of ‘perfection’.
I’ve gotten stronger and healthier since then. Though the illness left my lungs scarred, my body came back fighting. I can’t take that for granted.
I’ve gained back the weight, the softness, the strength. Some days, I still struggle between being good to my body and trying to make it look “pretty.” But I recovered. And I will never glamorize the ache again. My family didn’t save me so I could waste away beautifully.
I used to want to look like I was dying. Now, I want to look like I lived.
