Standing in front of the mirror, I see what is left of me—a body that used to feel like armor now looks like the aftermath of war. My reflection is a ghost draped in skin, ribs like scaffolding, eyes heavy with stories I do not want to tell. The silence hums louder than any sound. This decay feels personal, but it is not just mine. It is a reflection of something larger—a kind of collective rot that seeps into everything, from the body to the state. In George Packer’s “America’s Zombie Democracy,” he writes that democracy doesn’t collapse all at once; it erodes slowly, piece by piece, as people stop believing their voice matters. I think of that as I stare at the body in the mirror. Just like this system that was supposed to protect me, my body still exists—but the life in it has thinned. Both are still standing, but barely alive. Just as institutions pretend to function, so do I, caught between illusion and endurance.
There was a time when I believed in healing—in doctors, medicine, and systems that promised recovery. But chronic illness doesn’t heal; it lingers. The muscles ache, the joints inflame, the skin tightens, and fatigue turns every day into a negotiation. The body becomes both enemy and witness, fighting a war no one else can see. The National Institutes of Health describes this experience as one that alters not only physical health but also one’s entire sense of identity, often leading to isolation and depression (NIH, 2024). They call it an invisible battle—a phrase too clean for what it really feels like. There is nothing invisible about watching your strength drain from your limbs or feeling your mind unravel in frustration. In that mirror, I see not just pain but betrayal—a system of muscle and memory that has stopped following orders. It makes me wonder if the body, much like democracy, was ever built to last, or if it was always designed to collapse under too much pressure.
The longer I live with illness, the more I recognize the bureaucratic cruelty of survival. In Packer’s essay, he writes about “zombie institutions”—organizations that keep moving even after their purpose has died. Hospitals are like that. The fluorescent lights hum, the nurses move, the forms are filled, but the care feels hollow. You wait hours to be seen, repeat your story like a broken record, and watch compassion flicker out behind tired eyes. There are policies, procedures, and protocols, but not enough humanity. When Packer writes, “Checks on power have grown so weak that leaders can do pretty much what they want,” I think of medical systems where money and politics shape treatment, where suffering becomes a business model. Both systems reward endurance over healing—as long as you keep standing, you’re considered “fine.” Maybe that is the lie both democracy and the body tell: that functioning equals living.
Decay doesn’t always announce itself with noise; sometimes it comes dressed in normalcy. Packer says the new authoritarianism doesn’t rely on fear or force but on distraction—comfort that keeps people from questioning anything. That resonates with me deeply. Chronic illness numbs you in a similar way. You start adapting to pain until it becomes background noise. You start convincing yourself that silence means stability. And in that silence, the rot deepens. The American Psychological Association notes that chronic illness often leads to “learned helplessness,” a state where patients stop advocating for themselves because the system keeps failing them (APA, 2023). We scroll, we binge, we avoid—not because we do not care, but because caring feels exhausting. I see that exhaustion everywhere—in politics, in health care, in the way people have grown used to cruelty. Comfort has become the new form of control.
There is a part of me that refuses to die quietly. Maybe it is the anarchist in me—the one who still believes in rebellion, even if it is small. Writing, for me, is defiance. It is how I scream when my voice won’t come out. Poe taught me that beauty can live in decay. Cobain showed me that honesty, even when broken, can still be sacred. Gregg Olsen and Piu Eatwell taught me that the darkest stories often hold the most truth—that horror is just reality stripped of denial. I carry those voices when I write. Every line is an act of survival, a middle finger to silence. Art becomes my medicine when medicine fails. It is how I reclaim what illness and indifference keep trying to take from me: agency.
But survival is not pretty. It is not poetic in the way people romanticize it. It is messy, rancid, and relentless. The world tells you to find peace, but peace feels dishonest when everything around you is burning. I do not want peace. I want truth—even if it hurts. Packer’s piece ends with a warning: that authoritarianism thrives when people stop thinking, stop feeling, stop believing they have the power to act. That is what illness does too—it tries to convince you to give up, to surrender your will to something stronger than you. But maybe resistance is as simple as refusing to stop fighting, even when your body or your country tells you to rest.
Sometimes I wonder if decay is the most honest state of being—because in decay, everything false falls away. My body tells the truth even when my words fail. It tells me where the pain hides, where the damage lives, where the fight still burns. Maybe the same is true for the world we live in. We keep patching holes, pretending things are fine, but underneath, the structure groans. Like a body, a nation can only ignore its sickness for so long before it collapses under its own weight.
I do not write to inspire. I write to survive—to leave proof that I saw the rot and refused to look away. Maybe that is all resistance really is: to witness without flinching. My body might betray me again; the world might crumble further into apathy and corruption. But as long as I can still write, I can still fight. I do not need to be whole to be human.
In the end, I return to the mirror. The reflection is still thin, still haunted, but no longer silent. The body that betrayed me has become the proof that I am still here—still angry, still aware, still alive. Decay, I have learned, is not the opposite of life. It is what reminds us how precious living really is. If my body is a ruin, then let it be a ruin that speaks.
When I wrote “The Body That Betrayed Me,” I wasn’t trying to sound poetic or brave. I was trying to survive. I had just come out of another stretch of illness that stripped me down to bone and fear. My muscles were fading, my reflection barely felt human. Living with an autoimmune disease means waking up each day unsure whether your body will cooperate or collapse, and that uncertainty rewires the way you see yourself. Being autistic and ADHD adds another layer — my mind races, trying to make sense of something senseless. Writing became the only place where the chaos slowed down enough for me to breathe. The piece formed like a confession: unfiltered, sharp, and stripped of anything performative. I needed honesty more than beauty.
This piece grew from a moment in front of a mirror — a moment where my reflection felt like a stranger. My ribs surfaced like architecture, the shape of illness sculpting a version of myself I never consented to. That haunting image stayed with me until I finally sat down and let it bleed onto the page. I didn’t try to polish it. Pain isn’t pretty, so the writing shouldn’t be either. The rawness wasn’t a stylistic choice; it was the truth of the experience. And in that honesty, strangely, there was a kind of release. Naming the decay made it feel less like it owned me.
On a larger scale, this piece confronts powerlessness. Bodies fail. Systems fail. People slip through the cracks and get reduced to data points and symptoms. George Packer writes about democracy eroding from within, and I see a parallel in chronic illness — a quiet internal collapse disguised by the illusion of normalcy. We’re told everything is fine while something essential rots beneath the surface. That numb dread lives in both political decay and bodily betrayal. I wanted my writing to reflect not just the fear, but the resignation that comes when the world insists you’re “fine” while everything is burning.
Navigating medical systems taught me how easily people become disposable. The apathy — the way suffering becomes background noise — is its own kind of violence. My writing pushes back against that invisibility. I’m not just documenting symptoms; I’m documenting what it feels like to be unheard inside a system that treats survival like an inconvenience. Many people with chronic conditions live in that silence. I write for them too, hoping my words can give shape to experiences most people never see.
My influences show up in the style — Kurt Cobain’s journals, Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic honesty. Both artists understood decay intimately, the kind that isn’t just physical but emotional and existential. Their willingness to confront ugliness gave me permission to stop hiding mine. That’s why the imagery in my piece is sharp, sensory, sometimes abrasive. I wanted readers not just to picture the decline, but to feel it — to smell the rancid quiet, to sense the dread under the skin. Illness is visceral, and the language needed to reflect that.
Writing this piece was cathartic but also terrifying. Vulnerability exposes the softest parts of you — the parts you’d rather keep armored. But as I read the piece aloud, I realized that the trembling in my voice wasn’t weakness. It was survival. This writing allowed me to reclaim something illness had taken — the ability to define my own story. Pain became a language instead of a cage.
The biggest challenge was resisting the urge to make the piece “neat.” Illness isn’t neat. It comes in fragments, in breaths you can’t catch, in the quiet horror of watching yourself disappear. So I let the writing reflect that broken rhythm. The uneven sentences, the sensory overload, the imagery of erosion — all of it mirrors the experience of a body that won’t cooperate. I learned that surrendering to the mess is sometimes the only honest way to write.
As I look ahead, I know this piece is part of a larger arc in my writing — work that confronts decay, silence, and the systems that fail the most vulnerable. Chronic illness has a way of stripping you down to the truth. My writing lives there, in the cracks where people pretend not to look. I don’t want my work to comfort. I want it to confront, to linger, to make people question what kind of suffering we’ve normalized. If readers walk away uncomfortable or unsettled, then the piece did exactly what it needed to do.
Works Cited
American Psychological Association. “Chronic Illness and Mental Health.” APA, 2023, www.apa.org/topics/chronic-illness-mental-health.
National Institutes of Health. “The Psychological Impact of Chronic Illness.” NIH, 2024, www.nih.gov/research/chronic-illness-impact.
Packer, George. “America’s Zombie Democracy.” The Atlantic, 24 Sept. 2025, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/americas-zombie-democracy/680332/.
Salem McGee writes from the deepest parts of a broken soul, where the body falters and truth sharpen into something dark and unafraid. Their work lingers in the tension between darkness and ruin, drawing strength from chronic illness, memory, and defiance. Every piece they write is an act of survival and a reminder that even what decays can still speak.