The Phenomena of Perception

If the body is a medium of experience, then illness distorts the experience itself.

Illness is understood as a deviation from health. By this standard, health is suggested as a norm, and illness–an interruption. Health works smoothly because it relies on certain conditions such as predictability and reliability. However, autoimmune diseases interrupt those conditions and reveal just how much healthy experiences depend on circumstance.

The shift is often described as physical, but its effects are perceptual. Illness changes how the world is interpreted. The means and perspectives on distance, time, and energy are reformed, and what once required no attention now carries weight that was never there before. Variables such as fatigue, exhaustion, and flares are to be accounted for; time stops being a concept that passes over and over again but transforms into something that lingers around the body.

Autonomy is defined as the capacity and ability to choose. So, when one with an autoimmune disease cannot control how their body acts and reacts, where does their autonomy go? Even though choices remain, effectiveness becomes uncertain. Intention and control do not guarantee results, and the experience of autonomy is distorted.

Medical language only stabilizes this instability. In translating actions into data, medicine offers clarity. Simultaneously, it introduces a new way of seeing the body: as something to be monitored. Diagnosis organizes experience both retrospectively and prospectively. Past events are viewed as early signs while future actions are mapped out accordingly.

These changes aren’t dramatic all together. However, they are incremental, cumulative, and lingering. Illness not only changes the body but also the stories, organization, predictability, and independence of a person.

Overall, identity assumes cooperation. The body acts, time flows, and effort yields results. Illness removes this assumption. The self is measured not by what it accomplishes but by how it responds. Is this a loss of identity, or a more pure version of it? Autonomy is not fixed, but exercised in contemporary methods. Identity does persist; identity does adapt. Identity negotiates between intention and circumstance and responds to the uncertainty of the human experience.

Jan 28 • Written by Nathan Lee • Edited by Madison Paek