beauty and illness
I get the impression that beauty is an even bigger topic when you’re disabled or chronically ill.
If you’re not conventionally attractive, being sick or unable to do something due to disability is often interpreted as you being lazy or letting yourself go. If you were obese and your illness made you drastically lose weight, people see it as a plus, instead of suffering. They might even be jealous, even if it was dangerous and unhealthy for you. Meanwhile if you were thin and stay so or get even thinner, people tend to feel protective over you.
If you’re conventionally attractive, being sick a lot can be an endearing quality - like a baby fawn you want to protect and is poetically fragile, like the petals of a flower. Your life can be romanticized and written novels about.
But if you’re unattractive with the same issues, people are more inclined to call you inbred, call out your bad genes and that you shouldn’t procreate or exist at all; like you should be cleansed and are taking up valuable resources. They think it’s already visible in the way you look and use you as a poster child for why humanity is going downhill or whatever.
If you’re pretty, you’ve been dealt a bad hand in life, you poor thing. If you’re ugly, you’re the problem, ew.
I think about this because I wonder what people would think about my last post if they didn’t have a rough idea of what I look like due to pictures on my blog.
To be honest, being aware of this bias pressured me a lot (and still does) to not show illness on my body, made me starve to drop the Prednisone weight gain as quickly as possible, and buy some wigs too to bridge some awkward regrowth stages of my hair. I don’t know if people who have been historically very ill and continue to do so, like me, can “afford” to not fulfill beauty standards to look as healthy as possible. It’s not just about social interactions, it’s about the right to live, too.
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Published 24 Feb, 2025