Growing up in California—where green juice functions as both sustenance and social signifier—I found myself occupying a paradox: perpetually ill in a space where illness itself represents a failure of self-optimization. 

The phenomenology of childhood illness shapes not just our relationship to our bodies, but our very conception of selfhood. I grew up thinking my body was an enemy-- rebelling against wellness and constantly succumbing to colds, sore throats, flus, at every turn. 

My medical history reads like a case study: fourteen episodes of strep throat in a single year, a two-year course of antibiotics following a Lyme disease diagnosis at age twelve. The body, in this narrative, became a site of contested authority. 

Each intervention promised resolution but delivered only temporary reprieve. When I moved across the country for college, I spent each winter with pneumonia that lasted close to two months. I was prescribed, unsurprisingly, more antibiotics. 

Australian philosopher and theologist Ivan Illich criticized the prescription phenomenon as the "medicalization of life"—the reduction of complex bodily processes to mere symptom management and pharmaceutical solutions

For me, this looked like each turn leading not to healing, but to another prescription. The authority of doctors, once absolute in my mind, began to crack under the weight of repeated failures to provide lasting impact.

This year, out of college and living on my own in New York City, I was increasingly anxious as winter approached. After spending three New Year's Eves in a row with pneumonia, I decided to sit this one out and stay home. 

When the familiar throat tickle emerged days later, it catalyzed not just severe anxiety but a profound crisis: could there be another way of knowing and healing the body? I felt existential dread and misery at the thought that I could be getting sick again. 

Perhaps it was the independence that comes with building a life out of college, or maybe it was simply the culmination of years of frustration, but I was ready to re-approach health altogether. 

The coming weeks led me to conversations with functional medicine practitioners, muscle testing specialists, and even a psychoanalyst who proposed a radical notion: that illness might be the body's language rather than its betrayal. These alternative perspectives offered something the traditional establishment never had—a framework for understanding illness as communication rather than combat.

I reached out to a friend back home, deeply versed in integrative medicine. I asked if she had a recommendation for a general practitioner. "Doctors are for medicine and broken bones. You need to strengthen your immune system which they know next to nothing about,” she told me. 

The words fell into the room, loud and heavy. It felt like someone had finally broken the implicit contract of medical discourse, that tacit agreement to speak only in the language of pathology. 

This verbal breach initiated a radical reconfiguration of my thinking, leading me to explore the material semiotics of nutrition and supplementation: liposomal vitamin C, D3, B12, oregano oil, and glycine powder. Immediately, I was less tired throughout the day. Through weekly acupuncture and Chinese herbs, I started to feel more capable than ever. My cold faded, not evolving into anything stronger, and I escaped the month of January free of serious illness. 

I had a session with an integrative medicine practitioner. At the end of a two-hour intake about my medical, physical, and personal history, she declared that I was not, and never had been, autoimmune. These words pierced me. It felt like a truth, held in the body, but never before articulated. "Your body works for you, not against you," she asserted, dissolving years of accumulated clinical rhetoric around my body’s supposed betrayal. She implied that I had existed in a vicious cycle of anxiety and sickness and the two were interchangeable. My body mandated me to rest in uneasy times. 

This reframing suggests that illness might serve as protective mechanism rather than enemy combatant and opened up new terrain for my understanding of the relationship between psychological and somatic processes.

At twenty-two years old, I was moved to tears by her words and this reinterpretation of my medical history. What if sickness wasn't an enemy to be vanquished but a protective mechanism demanding attention?

My experience exists at the intersection of competing worldviews—conventional medicine with its evidence-based approaches, and alternative healing modalities that emphasize the body's innate wisdom. But this has left me with lasting questions about how we understand the relationship between self, body, and medical authority.

I'm still navigating this new territory, learning to balance traditional tools with alternative insights. But I don’t feel like a sick person anymore. The capacity to control my own immune system is unendingly satisfying. I realized what had been missing for me as a child was now attainable as an adult-- finding agency.