Centering the Chronically Ill Person the Media Forgot
This collab story authored by Namrata, edited by Priti Salian, was first published by the Reframing Disability Newsletter.
March 11 was Hashimoto’s Disease Awareness Day. Namrata, a friend of Reframing Disability, is an Indian writer and editor whose work often explores the intersections of literature, health, and identity. Since 2014, she has lived with two chronic conditions, Hashimoto’s Disease and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Namrata writes personal narratives and critical essays —like the one in today’s edition —that center lived experience, care, and resilience, and is the founder of the book marketing consultancy, Bookbots India and the literary consultancy, Keemiya Creatives.
“Chronic illness didn’t break me as much as corporate indifference did”
“In India, living with two chronic conditions can mean many things—sympathy, pity, challenge, or even nuisance, depending on the lens through which it is viewed,” Namrata tells Reframing Disability. “What these illnesses taught me early on is that the body speaks first, and explanations come later.”
Hashimoto’s Disease is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the thyroid, often mistaken for a simple hormonal imbalance that can be fixed with medication. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM), on the other hand, is frequently framed as a lifestyle failure rather than a complex metabolic condition shaped by genetics, stress, and environment.
“Together, they demand constant vigilance, patience, and negotiation, both with the body and with the world around it.”
Namrata elucidates her lived experience in her essay:
Most mornings, my first conversation is with fatigue. It arrives before sunlight, before thought, before whatever version of myself the world thinks it will meet that day. It sits with me as I try to wake up, reminding me, gently but firmly, that my body has its own weather system.
I used to believe mornings were neutral. Now they feel like negotiations.
People think fatigue is simple to resolve with a yawn, a coffee, or a shrug. But Hashimoto’s fatigue is not tiredness. It is a kind of gravity. It pulls at you from the inside. And the hardest part is not the heaviness itself, but explaining it to people who believe thyroid illness is a switch you flip with one pill. Autoimmune disease does not work that way. It is tidal. It comes and goes without warning, leaving you to rebuild yourself again and again.
Enter T2DM
T2DM joined my story in 2021, quietly but decisively, like an unexpected character walking into a scene and changing the entire plot.
There is science behind how frequently these two conditions travel together. Several Indian studies report significant overlap: one recent analysis of adult Indian women with T2DM found about 14% had coexisting hypothyroidism, most of it undiagnosed. Another large observational study confirmed that thyroid dysfunction and even thyroid autoantibodies show up frequently among diabetic patients.
I didn’t need research papers to tell me these illnesses often walk together. My own body taught me that lesson early.
The loneliness of managing chronic illness
Managing chronic illness is rarely about medication alone. It is about people around us. About whether you find a doctor who listens rather than rushes. About whether your workplace sees you as human or as a problem. About whether society believes your pain or treats it like melodrama.
The hardest part of T2DM, for me, has never been sugar. Or food. Or numbers. It has been the loneliness of trying to find clinical care grounded in empathy. You would think that would be easy in a country where diabetes is everywhere. But that is precisely the problem: when something becomes so common, people stop seeing the person behind it.
When I asked for accommodations at my corporate job, back when I was an investment banker, the response was brutal. I was forced to resign without pay, without notice, without acknowledgment of the years I had invested. It still makes my stomach clench when I think of it. Chronic illness didn’t break me as much as corporate indifference did.
People often ask whether I identify as disabled. The honest answer is: partially. Some days yes, some days no. Autoimmune illness is conditional, invisible, and unpredictable. I feel disabled on the days when a 1.5-hour drive to meet a friend drains all the energy I had saved for the actual meeting. By the time I arrive, I am running on fumes. But because I ‘look fine’, people assume I am simply quiet or introverted. They don’t see the invisible toll.
This invisibility breeds stereotypes. “You don’t look sick.” “You don’t sound sick.” “Why do you complain so much?” Or my personal favorite: “Your posts about illness are depressing.”
An urgent switch from triumph to truth
The world prefers sanitised stories of illness. The triumphant kind, and the easily digestible kind. Not the everyday truth of fatigue, fear, and negotiating limits. Chronic illness only becomes acceptable when it’s inspirational. Anything else is perceived as indulgence.
This is where media representation becomes crucial. For much of my life, T2DM has been framed as a morality tale, one built on shame and simplification. “Too much sugar.” “No discipline.” “Bad lifestyle choices.” What rarely enters the conversation are genetics, autoimmune links, metabolic complexity, or structural inequality. In India, where over 212 million adults live with diabetes—the highest number in the world—and 62% remain untreated, the narrative of individual failure collapses under its own weight.
The question, then, is not whether people are making the right choices, but whether the system allows for them at all.
Consider food. We speak endlessly about lifestyle changes, yet offer little structural support to make them viable. Healthy food remains expensive and inaccessible for many, while ultra-processed food is cheap, ubiquitous, and aggressively marketed. Regulatory action around sugar content, food labeling, trans fats, and junk food advertising remains hesitant at best. Awareness campaigns abound, but accountability is scarce. People are told to eat better in an environment that actively works against that advice.
Despite this, mainstream media across newspapers, television, and film, continues to rely on tired shorthand about chronic illness. What is missing are the realities: unpredictable fatigue, long commutes that drain the already limited energy, medical gaslighting, emotional labour, bureaucratic navigation, and the constant internal negotiation required simply to function.
Growing up, I never saw someone like me in stories
Hashimoto’s barely existed in mainstream conversations. Diabetes was a punchline. I had to go online to support groups, to community pages, often from people living abroad to find real stories. Stories that didn’t blame the patient. Stories that held pain with tenderness. Stories that felt like companionship rather than warning signs.
I didn’t find those stories in the Indian media. I found them in small digital communities, in newsletters like this one, where people spoke with tenderness and courage about their bodies. Reframing Disability does something Indian media rarely does: it makes invisibility visible. It gives space to the narratives that are usually brushed aside because they don’t fit the inspirational template. It acknowledges that chronic illness is a social experience, a political experience, and an emotional experience.
I often wonder how much softer my early years with these illnesses would have been if I had seen an accurate representation. A character on-screen who navigated fatigue without being mocked. A workplace scene where a chronic illness request wasn’t treated like betrayal. A profile of someone thriving with accommodations, not in spite of needing them.
These are the stories I needed. These are the stories many of us still need.
Chronic illness doesn’t make me less. It makes me different. It makes my days shaped by intention. My victories are subtle but profound. My life is slower but somehow brighter in its attentiveness.
And maybe that is the real story, the one I want the media to finally tell: Not the illness itself, but the person learning to live inside it.
