The Romance of Suffering

Currently, I’m listening to Everything is Tuberculosis, authored and read by Hank Green. It’s a damn good nonfiction essay — part medical reporting, part personal narrative, part philosophical reflection. At the time of writing, I don’t yet know whether Henry, a 17-year-old patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, survives his battle with tuberculosis — but man, am I invested.

Like many readers, I had no idea how prevalent TB still is — or how curable. The disease that once killed the Brontë sisters, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, George Orwell, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka is still quietly taking lives around the world. In the 19th century, TB — or “consumption,” as it was called — wasn’t just common; it was romanticized. Especially in women. The waifish body, sunken eyes, porcelain skin, and delicate demeanor were seen as beautiful, even ethereal. Never mind the hacking cough or night sweats. Consumption was poetic. Byron even said, “I should like, I think, to die of a consumption.”

This fascination with the tragic artist goes far beyond TB. We’re drawn to the idea of pain as fuel for genius. Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch — their art is often inseparable from their suffering. “...and he cut off his own ear.” “...and she lived with chronic pain.” “...and he had borderline personality disorder.” Amy Winehouse’s addictions were dissected as often as her music. Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose still overshadows conversations about his talent.

We don’t just admire artists — we mythologize their undoing. Somewhere along the line, we decided that suffering equals substance. That tragedy is the ticket to being taken seriously.

But it goes deeper than that. We don’t just treat suffering as part of the artist’s story — we treat it as the origin of their creativity. There’s this unspoken idea that van Gogh didn’t just paint through his psychosis, but because of it. That Sylvia Plath’s depression was the engine behind her poetry. That Amy Winehouse wouldn’t have been so brilliant if she’d gotten clean.

Illness becomes not just context, but cause. And once you start believing that, it’s hard to imagine making anything good without some part of you falling apart.

And that belief has consequences.

At the start of every writing workshop I teach, I ask participants what genre they write in. Almost without fail, someone says, “Fiction,” and then immediately adds, “Nothing interesting has really happened in my life.” As if that disqualifies them from writing. As if they haven’t earned their stories yet.

In college, I was part of a small group of creative writing students helping to hire a new professor. Every finalist had an MFA, a forthcoming book, and — notably — a memoir. “They’re so young,” one of the older English professors said. “What could they possibly have to write about?”

The implication was clear: no tragedy, no truth.

What I’ve come to understand is that creativity and tragedy are often linked — but they are not the same. Yes, I started writing during a time in my life when I wasn’t the biggest fan of living. But what’s kept me writing hasn’t been pain — it’s been discipline, curiosity, and the quiet belief that stories matter, even when they’re not born from fire.

What Everything is Tuberculosis makes so clear is that this thinking doesn’t hold up in real life. Henry isn’t writing poems because he’s dying — he’s writing them because he’s alive, and scared, and observant, and trying to make sense of it all. The art isn’t coming from the suffering. It’s happening in spite of it. That’s a key difference, and one we often miss.

Henry isn’t a symbol — he’s a teenager with a treatable disease in a system that’s failing him. His poetry matters not because he’s suffering, but because he’s human. Green reminds us that we don’t need to mythologize pain to take it seriously.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe we can stop telling artists that their suffering is the most interesting thing about them — or worse, the source of their talent.

Maybe we can let go of the idea that you have to break before you get to make.