StacySchumann

The Performance of Health is an essay I wrote about the harm perpetuated by the very systems meant to provide care. It examines the structural violence of medicine — how disbelief, dismissal, and delay become routine barriers, enforced by institutions and reinforced by doctors who do not listen.

The piece blends personal narrative with deep research on medical trauma and the systemic failures occurring in medicine.

It traces how patients learn to perform wellness — polished, polite, “credible” — simply to access care, and asks what becomes possible when we stop performing and begin reclaiming the systems our bodies inhabit.

Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom offered a framework for situating these stories within a broader cultural reckoning with chronic illness and medical disbelief. Her book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, changed my life. When I later shared my essay, inspired by her book, an editor at STAT News called it powerful. That led to my acceptance to Goucher for an MFA in creative non-fiction.

I share it here as part of a broader effort to recognize patient testimony as knowledge — knowledge that must shape the future of care.

👉 Link in bio.

The Performance of Health is now live on Substack. It explores medical trauma, the survival performance demanded by care, and what it means to reclaim presence. 
 
A STAT News editor recently called my writing on this subject “powerful.”
This piece carries that same urgency. 
 
💬 Have you ever performed health in order to be believed? 
 
For me, it once looked like laughing at a cruel comment in a doctor’s office, just to stay in the room. It looked like sitting upright when I was dizzy, masking panic so I wouldn’t be dismissed. 
 
Writing this essay was my way of saying: I don’t do that anymore.
 
Have you witnessed this in your own life or with loved ones? 
 
Full essay: link in bio (I’ll also drop it in the comments).

Health is not a lifestyle brand. When wellness is packaged and sold, those without privilege are left behind. Real care lives in equity, access, and community. What does care beyond commerce look like to you?

If your health advice only works for the privileged, it’s not health — it’s performance.

This is my first post here as Stacy Schumann. I write at the intersection of medicine, identity, and repair.

My first Substack essay, The Performance of Health, is coming soon — it was recently called “powerful” by an editor at STAT News. Subscribe via the link in my bio to be the first to read it.

Chronic illness often reveals itself not just in symptoms, but in the silence it draws around us. We stop talking about legacy, about summer plans. Instead, we inhabit a landscape shaped by loss and invisibility. Our pain becomes something to sidestep, to erase.    ⁣
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As setbacks accumulate—hospitalizations, surgeries, new diagnoses—what disappears is not always love, but structure. Not outright rejection, but the slow, quiet erosion of the social scaffolding that should hold us up.    ⁣
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In this liminal space, we learn to perform health just to stay tethered to others. At its best, it reads as optimism.
At its worst, it deepens the isolation.
We hide our truth—not to deceive, but to make others more comfortable.    ⁣
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Chronic illness asks us to reimagine connection—not around comfort, but around truth. The landscape may not be “normal,” but it is rich in ways most will never fully understand. It is hard won wisdom born of the ashes.