Sickening

“Well you don’t look sick,” is a phrase that fills me with unsurmountable frustration. The very idea that someone has to “look” sick in order to actually be sick is a stereotype prevalent in our world that most would never pay any attention to. When we envision someone who is “sick” we think of the eight year old girl with no hair laying in a hospital bed with tubes wrapping around her entire body. We think of the stomach flu we had last year when we fell asleep on the bathroom floor, terrified to be more than a few feet from the toilet. We most certainly think of the sniffling children in a grade school who wipe their noises on their hands and then touch everything just before we have to. No one decided to start a campaign or activist group to inform us all that these are the acceptable ways to be sick, yet they are most people’s definition of the word “sick”. To be sick, you have to look and act sick and through stories that we have been told, these are our definitions of sick.

When I was 15 years old I joined my high school’s first committee to hold an American Cancer Society Relay for Life. All school year long I had pranced around the cafeteria handing out flyers with a picture of a little kid with cancer and advertised for our event. These poor kids are so sick and need to have money raised for them to find a cure so that no one would have to suffer like that. No one really needed to be shone the pictures or told the story, they had all seen it before on television in commercials, but we reiterated it once again, we hammered in the idea that these images were the literal definition of sick.

During my first year in college I worked at an elementary school as an assistant in a second grade classroom. In that year there was b...

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...ple that look like you do every single day, but unless you ask them, you’ll never know that they really are sick.

Being told that “You don’t look sick,” is one of the most exasperating phrases you can be told if you are sick with something that people do not know much about. It’s not everyone’s fault that they do not know about your ailment; it is simply that they have only been told stories of a bed ridden person unable to act in daily life. Media tells this story because it is still a story that exists, but what they fail to tell you is that it is not the only story that exists. Being sick does not look a certain way, nor does it feel a certain way, and the stereotype about it is one that may never change, but if you ever do become sick with an ailment that cannot be visibly seen, you will understand why the phrase “You don’t look sick,” is absolutely sickening.