Roundtable

What Healing Erases: Illness, Identity, and the Violence of Normalcy

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Abstract

This reflective essay challenges conventional narratives of recovery and normalcy by exploring the often-overlooked emotional and existential terrain of becoming well after chronic illness. While illness has long been understood as a disruption to normative life paths, this piece centers the loss and grief embedded in healing—losses of identity, structure, community, and the slower, intentional ways of living that illness may cultivate. Drawing on personal experience and critical disability theory, the author resists the binary of ‘sick’ and ‘well’, and interrogates how societal ideals of health, thinness, and productivity are imposed during recovery. The essay critiques medical and therapeutic practices that frame fatness, pain, and non-normative embodiment as conditions to be fixed. Instead, it proposes a vision of recovery as integration rather than erasure, a reclamation of wholeness that embraces contradiction, fragmentation, and the enduring presence of illness. Ultimately, the work reimagines health and identity outside linear frameworks, emphasizing the political and personal power of living in multiplicity.

Keywords: Chronic Illness, Disability Studies, Recovery Narratives, Identity, Fatness, Medical Normalization, Intentional Living

How to Cite:

Claes, A., (2025) “What Healing Erases: Illness, Identity, and the Violence of Normalcy”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 12(1), 21-26. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.95438