On Being Ill

Public domain apparently… though it was almost certainly AI generated anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, walking in London, I saw an anti-vax sticker on a traffic light that was almost impressively infuriating. It had a picture of a medical mask next to words along the lines of “You say we’re just scared of needles, but you’re just scared of the air” (I really should have taken a photo of it). Above it was another sticker seemingly calling out vapor trails for causing climate change.

It felt almost quaint how old-fashioned the sticker seemed now. Back in 2020, to be against masking was to be defiantly against the status quo. In Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025), which is set in that year, Jaoquin Phoenix’s sheriff Joe Cross receives the ire of a lot of fellow shoppers when he refuses to wear a mask in a corner shop. Nowadays it seems like you are more likely to receive comments or odd looks from folks if you wear a mask in public because – as the sticker insinuated – it makes you seem like the kind of woke pussy who’s afraid of the air. We’re very firmly in the post-woke era and walking out of my flat wearing a mask to go to the shop today, the first person I encountered made a show of stepping out of the way and hailing me, as though I was engaged in a particularly self-regarding piece of performance art.

However, what the sticker failed to recognise is that people might wear a mask to try to prevent or limit the spread of their own diseases to others. Within the post-woke, paranoid mindset that seems increasingly the norm here in the UK, the idea that someone might do something for others – for civic or social good – is not merely laughable, but unthinkable.

Readers of this blog will know that I donated a kidney back in August and that the operation was a bit more complicated than expected. Possibly due to this, my immune system has been pretty shot in the months since and I have been ill with various colds and infections regularly since. Having asthmatic family members and being a member of a largely elderly, variously immuno-compromised congregation, I try to be somwhat considerate about not making others sick. This should be… pretty normal?

Maybe being ill has made me even more cynical and pessimistic, but I don’t feel you get much sympathy here in the UK when you’re ill. Certainly, if you’re hobbling your way in pain through the streets of London, it’s the rare individual who makes sure not to rush past you and give you some space.

But I think the stark fact is that when we are not ill, we very quickly forget how horrible the experience is, abstracting it away into bite-sized symptom lists we dutifully ticked off on our road to recovery. As such, we might hold a certain generalised pity for the unwell, but we can’t feel true empathy for them unless we’re experiencing sickness or pain ourselves, in which case our world tends to shrink inwards while we focus upon our own survival (unless you’re a mother I suppose because then you don’t get that luxury).

I first read Virginia Woolf’s brilliant essay ‘On Being Ill’ when I was a 20-year-old ungraduate convinced I was dying from a brain tumour (reader, it was an impacted wisdom tooth). Despite my illness being hypochrondria (fueled by my -then- rather vicious OCD), I was probably about as lonely and alienated as I would have been had I been actually suffering from a tumour. Certainly, I’d alienated my housemates with my self-pitying declarations about my upcoming demise to the point that we were communicating via passive-aggressive post-it notes. Moreover, the fact that I has been consigned to the inner bedroom with no outwards-facing windows and yellow walls meant that I felt a bit like how I imagined Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist must have felt (reader, I had no spoons to give).

Memorably, Woolf speaks of the ill individual as having fallen from the ranks of the “army of the upright”. I definitely suffer from feeling like a malingerer when I am ill, resulting in my avoiding taking days off sick from work and then getting snappy or even confrontational to colleagues when teaching has been at its worst (kids can tell when you’re ill and while some are sympathic, more tend to circle like sharks around a drowning, bleeding man). However, I think Woolf’s phrase speaks to a deeper ontological fissure. When you are ill you sometimes don’t feel like a human being amongst other humans. It is a devestatingly lonely, alienating experience and I think we try to forget that as soon as we are well again because it is too scary to hold onto. Of course, the chronically ill just have to live with it while knowing that their friends in the army of the upright, with their pitying looks, are keeping them at a distance, fearful that they will be contaminated and cast out once again.

Woolf also reflects in her essay that, considering how common illness is, there is a real paucity of writing about it. While I think this has changed with the internet, it is rare that I have come across writing that really grapples with the phenomenology of being ill. Maybe language was developed by members of the army of the upright and, as such, is ill-equipped for dealing with the experience of being in pain and vomiting and praying to a God you’re not sure you believe in to please just make it stop I will do anything.

Frustratingly, critics have tended to read ‘On Being Ill’ autobiographically or allegorically as a coded portrait of the strictures of late-Victorian womanhood (as with Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’). Perhaps it has been discussed in recent decades within the pages of disability studies journals, but I still fear academia has a tendency towards respectable abstraction, which can feel especially absurd when you’re crouched over a toilet, stinking. Still, we have to try to retain our dignity, especially if we wish to remain employed.

I do think, however, the wonderful composer Jessica Curry does a brilliant job of writing about illness in a honest, embodied way; so, after reading Woolf, you should read her too~