My Story
31 years of illness, a lifetime of musical theater.
If you found your way here, chances are your body or your brain has complicated your life. Maybe both. Maybe you’re the ambitious kind, the kind trying to make things, build things, become someone, while your health keeps other plans. Or maybe you love someone like that.
Quick note: This is the long version — my whole story. If you’d rather start with what this newsletter actually is and what you’ll get, begin here: START HERE
Either way, welcome. This is Between Sick & Well, and it’s built on one idea: every body is somewhere on the line between sick and well. Nobody gets to opt out of having a body. Some of us just live closer to one end, and we’ve learned things out here that everyone eventually needs.
This is self-help for sick people, written by someone who's both. Emphasis on the research. Yes, some of it is my own hard-won thoughts, but most of it is me hauling back the good stuff from books, studies, and the smartest people I can find. Self-help with receipts. I could call it personal development, but I'll embrace the popular term because I'm a pop kinda gal. I mean, I wrote Real Housewives The Musical for Christ's sake.
Here’s my story, so you know who you’re dealing with.
I first started getting really sick around age 18, which means I’ve been some version of my sick self for 31 years. The diagnosis took 25 of them. It finally came eight years ago, when my mom, a pharmacist, asked the right question while I was in the hospital with pneumonia. Turns out I make zero antibodies. It’s called Common Variable Immune Deficiency, a disease in which your body doesn’t make some or all antibodies. Mine makes none, so it hits me from every direction: respiratory, gut, and everything in between. I started intravenous plasma replacement therapy, and I’ve been on it ever since.
But that was after more than 30 doctors and decades of being sick and misunderstood. Somewhere in all those years, worn down and not feeling well mentally, I saw a primary physician who really wanted me to stop bothering her. She put me on Paxil. I didn’t know that SSRI medication can trigger a mood disorder. Mood disorders run in my family: bipolar and schizophrenia both, and um… a lot.
A year and a half of panic attacks mixed with elation and extreme weight loss before I was finally slapped with a Bipolar 2 diagnosis.
So I shouldn’t take Paxil, I guess.
There are many times I think I can’t cope much longer with illness. But of course, I do. And I do it very well! Professionally well! And that can be really tricky.
I walk a tightrope every day, trying to be nonchalant so as not to anger the health gods. A ridiculous ritual that has no real bearing on how I’m actually moving through the world, but here we are.
And at some point, after about three decades, you unlock a secret level in the game: acceptance. The kind where you finally understand this isn’t going away. Acceptance comes with a job. Once you stop waiting to be cured, you start noticing what makes you less sick and what makes you more sick.
Which work makes you expansive and which makes your body contract and implode?
Which friendships feel nurturing and which require so much compromise your body has become quietly resentful?
There are a lot of decisions to be made when you’re trying to save your own life.
That’s what this Substack is. The decisions, researched. Thirty years of daily illness means thirty years of rabbit holes. The books, the protocols, the 2am research spirals. I go down all of them and bring back things that have helped me.
But I have one more credential, and it’s the strange one: I’m a musical theater performer and I write musicals. My first, Becoming Britney about Britney Spears and the shaving the head incident. It is a lovingly attempt at understanding what happened to poor Britney. I won best performance at The New York Fringe Festival for this role. I also wrote Real Housewives The Musical which is available for worldwide licensing through Concord Theatricals in New York. Stage, voice, dance, all of it, for my whole life. I was born to strut.
Here’s what performing and writing at a fairly high level, while being sick, has taught me: the creative act is medicine. Not metaphorically. For the past five years I’ve been writing a solo musical about navigating chronic illness as a professional performer, and writing myself as a character is the one place I literally forget I’m sick. I pay the price offstage, yes. But onstage, in a state of flow, something rights itself inside me. All is well in my somatic body in a way I can’t manufacture anywhere else. I wrote that show to save my life, and I don’t mean that in an overdramatic way, which I’m known to be. The focus it required anchored my nervous system in ways therapy alone couldn’t.
That discovery is the engine of everything here. The stage, the voice, and the creative act have things to teach a body that won’t cooperate, and I’ve spent 30 years as a performer and teacher collecting those lessons. So around here you’ll get essays on the mess where creativity and illness tangle: telling your drive from your disorder, the bravery hangover, the efficiency trap, why hiding is more exhausting than being seen. Tools I actually use. Occasionally a monologue or a song, because sometimes the truest version of a story needs music. And coming this fall, Studio Molly, part two of this Substack, where the teaching starts: dance fitness for finding your balance, singing lessons, and other creative exercises built to heal.
One promise before you dive in. I will never write to you from the end. I’m not recovered, arrived, or optimized. I’m on the tightrope with you, working it out in public, and the question I’m walking toward is the same one I’d hand to you: whether your particular combination of experiences, the mess, the music, the medicine, the hope, has real value in this world.
I think it does. Mine and yours.
I’m getting there. Come with me! And please let me know in the comments or by sending my a DM why you’ve joined me and a little about you.
Until next time, (and please consider leaving a heart or sharing this to support me! Even better SUBSCRIBE…it’s FREE)
xx, Miss Molly Bell 🔔