On Being Ill: What Our Bodies Carry as We Grow Older
More than a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wrote her essay On Being Ill. She wrote it while confined to bed, recovering from what we would now recognise as a nervous breakdown. In that essay, Woolf makes an observation that still feels quietly radical today. She writes that it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and jealousy and battle among the prime themes of literature.
Illness, Woolf suggests, is both universal and transformative. And yet, despite how common it is, we rarely speak about it openly or thoughtfully. It remains something to endure quietly, to manage privately, or to move through as quickly as possible so that life can return to normal.
She goes on to reflect on the profound inner shift that illness brings:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down…
What Woolf captures so clearly is not simply the physical discomfort of being unwell, but the emotional and psychological world that opens up when the body lets us down. Illness can be lonely. It can strip away independence, confidence and certainty. It can leave us feeling exposed and vulnerable in ways that are difficult to explain, especially to those who are well.
For many of us, these experiences become more familiar as we grow older.
Illness and the connection between body and mind
One of the most important insights in On Being Ill is Woolf’s recognition that physical illness rarely exists separately from our emotional and mental wellbeing. When the body is unwell, the mind often follows. Yet culturally, we still tend to treat physical and mental health as if they were separate systems, addressed in different places and spoken about in different ways.
This separation is misleading and unhelpful.
We now have a far greater understanding of the relationship between body and mind. The work of Bessel van der Kolk, particularly in The Body Keeps the Score, shows how emotional stress and trauma are not only psychological experiences but are also held in the body.
A healthy body is more likely to support a healthy mind. And a distressed mind can, over time, show itself through physical illness. This relationship is complex and deeply individual, but it is real.
Yet especially in later life, we rarely talk about how years of emotional strain, responsibility, stress or unprocessed experience may quietly shape our physical health.
Holistic health and the weight of lived experience
As we age, it may be helpful to look at health through a wider, more holistic lens. Not because something is wrong with us, but because our bodies have been living with us for a long time.
By later life, the body is no longer a blank slate. It carries decades of lived experience. Physical effort, emotional stress, joy, grief, routines, relationships, loss, love, pressure and adaptation. All of it leaves a trace. Some of these traces are obvious. Others are quieter and harder to recognise.
From a holistic perspective, symptoms are not always random or meaningless. They can be signals. Not necessarily problems to eliminate immediately, but messages asking to be noticed. This does not mean every illness has a simple emotional cause, or that we are somehow responsible for being unwell. It means recognising that body and life are not separate.
Many of us have spent years pushing through tiredness, ignoring stress, or prioritising productivity over rest. The body adapts, often remarkably well, until it can no longer do so. What appears later in life may not be something new at all, but the result of a long accumulation.
This is one reason illness can feel so confronting as we grow older. It is not only the disruption to daily life, but the way it invites reflection. On how we have lived. What we have endured. What we have carried quietly. What we have survived.
Seen this way, holistic health becomes less about fixing and more about understanding. It invites curiosity rather than judgement. Instead of asking only how to get rid of symptoms, we might also ask what the body has been holding, and what it might need now that it did not need before.
Making space to talk about illness
Perhaps what Woolf was inviting us to do was to bring illness into the open. To talk about it not only as a medical event, but as a human experience that affects identity, relationships and our sense of self.
Illness is not a personal failure. It is not something to minimise or rush past. And it is not something that belongs only in a doctor’s office.
As we grow older, creating space for honest conversations about illness, vulnerability and wellbeing can help us feel less alone and more connected to ourselves and to one another. It allows us to acknowledge that health in later life is not about returning to how things once were, but about learning how to live well with the body we have today, shaped by a lifetime of experience.
Perhaps it is time, as Woolf suggested over a century ago, for illness to take its rightful place in our shared stories.
Something to think about
When was the last time you listened to what your body was asking for, rather than pushing through discomfort? What might change if you treated illness as information rather than interruption?
Something to do
The next time you feel unwell, physically or emotionally, try writing a few sentences about how it affects your mood, thoughts or sense of self. Not to fix anything, just to notice.
Something to explore
You might explore On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, or writings on holistic health and the body mind connection that focus on lived experience rather than quick solutions.
If you would like to receive a weekly reflection like this, exploring aging, health, identity and how we want to live as we grow older, you can subscribe to the Freedom in Later Life newsletter. Each Thursday I share something to think about, something to do and something to explore, delivered thoughtfully and without noise.
