The Uncanny Body: Autoimmune Diseases, Inheritance, and Feeling Weird In Your Own Skin
It started with routine blood work—the kind you put off for months until your doctor finally corners you with a gentle reminder and a lab slip. If I’m feeling honest, I only made the appointment because my health insurance offers wellness points for getting a physical with a primary care provider. Points = free stuff, and I’m not above an incentive and a pat on the back. I needed to establish care with a PCP anyway, so I figured, why not? I certainly wasn’t expecting anything dramatic. I definitely wasn’t prepared for my results to suggest that my immune system had betrayed my body.
Evidently, I have a common autoimmune disorder, easily manageable and practically expected in my family. My dad has it. My grandmother had it. I figured I might get it eventually, but the confirmation still feels like a strange betrayal. Suddenly, my thyroid is the main character in my health narrative, and I’m trying to understand how I ended up here, decoding my body like it’s speaking a language I once knew but haven’t practiced in years.
I don’t really feel any different. I don’t have most of the symptoms that pop up in my late-night searches. My hair isn’t falling out, my energy’s decent (debatable), and I’m not freezing all the time (unless it’s winter in South Dakota, which doesn’t count). But when the blood work came back, I looked at it and thought, ehhhhh, okay. That does look bad. My new autoimmune disease might not be screaming at me physically, but it’s still there, doing its thing. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Lately, I’ve become obsessed with my thyroid. I keep staring at my neck in the mirror. I read studies I don’t entirely understand, examine symptom lists like they’re cryptic prophecies, and feel every flutter of fatigue or weight fluctuation with a hypersensitive awareness. It’s not just about the physical symptoms—it’s the eerie uncanniness of it all. My body is familiar, and yet, not. It’s doing something without my permission, subtly shifting the ground beneath me until the mirror reflects a slightly off version of myself.
The philosopher Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny (or unheimlich) as the familiar made strange, the once-comforting rendered unsettling through distortion or repetition. That’s precisely how this feels. This is still my body, my blood, my pulse—but now I view it with suspicion as if it has secrets I haven’t yet discovered. Sneaky. This diagnosis certainly isn’t life-threatening, but it alters the texture of my daily experience, mostly mentally for now. I feel like I’m living in a body that knows something I don’t.
This sense of alienation has brought back memories of my grandmother, who was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma in 2015. It’s important to say clearly: Hashimoto’s and cancer are entirely different diagnoses with different implications. But illness has a way of collapsing timelines, of echoing past traumas in present moments. I remember how her voice changed after treatment, how her posture shifted, how the woman I knew was still there, but surrounded by unfamiliar textures—IV poles, portacaths, half-empty cups of Ensure. Her body was still hers, but it wasn’t the body she had lived in before. Watching her navigate that transformation made me think about embodiment in a way I didn’t have the language for at the time. Now, with my own autoimmune diagnosis on the horizon, I feel the eerie echo of her experience—not in diagnosis, but in estrangement.
Living with an autoimmune disease means coming to terms with a body that’s simultaneously yours and not yours. It’s the uncanny valley of health—where you still function and look like yourself, but something has shifted in such a subtle, internal way that everything feels slightly off-kilter. The uncanny isn’t dramatic; it’s unsettling precisely because it is so close to the ordinary. A thyroid isn’t something most people think about on a daily basis—until it starts to misbehave.
There’s a quiet grief in realizing your body has begun a conversation with itself that doesn’t include you. And yet, there’s also curiosity. What does it mean to inhabit a body with inherited genetic, emotional, and immunological stories? How much of my experience is mine, and how much was shaped long before I was born?
I’m learning to live in this slightly unfamiliar version of myself for now. Like a peacock in a molting phase—still technically majestic, but a little patchy and rough on the eyes. I’m adjusting the narrative, finding language for the strange, subdued grief that comes from feeling not-quite-at-home in my own skin. I’m not broken or sick in a way that demands pity or panic. But I am shifting—into something new, something uncanny, something inherited, and, ultimately, something still entirely mine.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from horror stories, Gothic novels, and autoimmune diagnoses, it’s this: the unfamiliar doesn’t always mean something terrible. Sometimes, it’s just a new framework—unsettling at first, but still livable, still yours. My body may be in the middle of rewriting a script I didn’t agree to, but I’m here figuring out what each new line of my blood work means.
Living in a body that suddenly feels like it’s hiding something is strange. But even in that strangeness, there’s power in naming what’s happening. There’s comfort in curiosity. And there’s something oddly beautiful in learning to inhabit a version of myself I didn’t expect—but can still come to understand.
