However, as someone who, for nearly the last 20 years, has lived with an invisible disease, I can tell you that it’s a legitimate look. My personal disease complex stems from an unusual neurological condition called cerebrospinal fluid leak syndrome, which leads to an insufficiently protected brain around it. I also have post-concussion syndrome. In my own decades with the disease as a variable close companion, there were many times when my life was truly defined by pain and disability on the inside, but still looked quite nice and joyous on paper (or on Facebook). . I had two children, I moved to the city, I traveled, I organized events, I wrote books and articles, I got out of a marriage that was not working, I had boyfriends. Sometimes I did some of these things very slowly, like I was coming out of a lake of glue. Sometimes he did them white-knuckled, with a brain that felt like a fat, roasted whale bladder. Other times I was more fine, like now, and if someone met me on the street, they could assume that I was 100 percent cured.
What I am describing here is the spectrum between spaces of functional disease, a zone occupied by many with invisible diseases, with feet in both the world of good and the universe of the sick. Sociologist Arthur W. Frank has called this cohort the “referral society.” But I prefer to think of it as a walking wounded society, because the term better includes people afflicted with conditions like lupus, Lyme disease, migraine headaches, endometriosis, and, yes, the stubborn remnants of concussion—all which are more chronic. despised, incredulous or gaslighted, especially by the medical community.
Interestingly, it’s a realm that Paltrow says she herself inhabits. Just a few days before the trial began, the actor and Goop founder was criticized for a podcast interview in which he seemed to suggest that her normal daily food intake consisted of coffee, bone broth and vegetables, a therapeutic diet that she says has helped her overcome her own symptoms of long-term Covid and other health problems. (Paltrow later clarified that she eats “full meals.”) But the interview, which could have been given strategically to position Paltrow as a sick person who got sick without complaint and then minded her own business through an anti-inflammatory diet and a stiff upper lip (instead of guilt and courts), counterproductive: He not only made Paltrow look messy and out of touch; she also put hers her own health problems in quotes like Sanderson’s. An invisible disease, and therefore relentlessly questioned.
So, I don’t think Sanderson is a victim of reckless Hollywood royalty on skis. But I do believe in his brain injury. Because I know, intimately, what a brain injury can do. And I know that between sickness and health, there really is no such thing as a zero sum game. A man can have a life altered forever by a concussion. And he can Zumba too.
Source photos: mbbirdy/E+/Getty Images; YouTube screenshot.
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