When Nick Jonas was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in November 2005, an entire generation of Disney Channel viewers was collectively shocked. 

I remember sitting on my friend's couch in elementary school, unable to wrap my head around the idea of a lifelong condition. In the 21 years since then, more than six million people have received that same diagnosis, including myself, yet Nick Jonas is still somehow, our only mainstream reference point. However,

Chronic illnesses are everywhere. 

On TikTok, the #chronicillness tag has millions of views, with people trading life hacks, dark humor, and daily survival strategies, revealing the unglamorous logistics of living in a body that doesn't cooperate with you. 

I’ve noticed, though, that there's a harsh split between that messy, funny, and alive version of illness and what Hollywood gives us back in return. Television keeps physical illness confined to sterile hospital dramas like Grey's Anatomy or The Resident, building key tensions around crisis, moral lessons, and tidy resolutions. 

Rarely does a condition get woven into a character's daily existence as texture rather than plot. 

Conversations with Friends pulled it off with Frances's endometriosis, and Sex Education did it with Isaac, who uses a wheelchair. Both are examples of complicated people who navigate physical limitations, without it being the sole focus. 

I was a few months into my first semester of college when I learned I had T1D, and it was hardly contained to doctor's offices. It showed up on the bus, the dining hall, at parties I left early. I wonder what it might’ve been like to have an onscreen reference besides Nick Jonas. 

Instead, pop culture treats physical disability like a social HIPAA violation, looking away so no one has to sit with the discomfort.

Euphoria offers a bit of guidance on getting taboo topics into the cultural conversation. They did it through aesthetics, for better or for worse. With smudged glitter, moody neon, and oversized hoodies, the show dressed addiction and mental illness in enough flashiness  that an audience who might have flinched leaned in instead. It destigmatized by making things gorgeous, not gentle.

Aestheticizing illness can tip into something dishonest when it’s a way of making suffering palatable for people who'd rather look at it than understand it.

It can also be a demand that sick people perform prettiness on top of everything their bodies already ask of them. That tension is real and I don't think it fully resolves. 

But I'd rather sit inside that mess than keep getting nothing at all, and romanticizing something is a way of choosing how it gets looked at. 

Aesthetic control is often the only control you have when your physiology goes off-script. 

If the media won't give us multidimensional characters who manage broken bodies without turning them into tragedies or morality plays, we'll design the aesthetics ourselves.

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