The Beautiful and the Bitten: Why Lyme Disease Haunts the Glitterati

There is something uncanny about watching Bella Hadid, one of the most photographed women on the planet, post a picture of herself receiving intravenous antibiotics—luminous, stoic, sick. The camera, usually a curator of illusion, now catches something real. Yet even then, it’s filtered through the soft-focus glare of fame. Lyme disease has a way of sneaking into the lives of the hyper-visible and turning them—just for a moment—into shadows of themselves. And isn’t that what makes it so irresistible to watch?

Lyme isn’t photogenic. It’s not dramatic like cancer, or cause-driven like mental health. It’s the great in-betweener: vague, chronic, contested. And yet, here it is, staging a quiet residency in the bloodstream of some of the most perfectly constructed bodies in pop culture. Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, Shania Twain, Alec Baldwin. A collection of people whose fame is often predicated on invincibility, now publicly unraveling at the edges of an illness many still don’t fully understand.

Fame, Fatigue, and the Medicine Cabinet

When Bella writes, “The little me that stayed strong gave me the strength to keep going,” it doesn’t just sound like the weary cry of a warrior—it reads like a Hollywood script, just one without a third act. Because what happens when your illness doesn’t resolve in time for the finale? What if you’re not healed by the end of the scroll?

It’s telling that many of these stars share their symptoms only after a long delay—after the diagnosis, the doctors, the disbelief. It mirrors the lived reality of Lyme: a disease that makes you question your own mind before anyone else believes your body. There’s no glamorous surgery, no announcement of remission, no Emmy for surviving. Just fatigue, rashes, brain fog, joint pain, and the soft, endless erosion of control. It’s invisible illness wrapped in very visible fame.

The New Gothic of Wellness

Our cultural obsession with health has never looked more polished—cryo chambers, collagen shots, $200 green juices. But Lyme creeps beneath all that, anti-aesthetic, inconvenient, undiagnosed. It refuses the cleanse. It demands ugliness. The result? A strange, almost gothic tension. Stars post wellness routines on TikTok, then quietly disappear into clinics for months. What are they running from? Or worse—what have they already met?

Perhaps that’s what draws us in. Lyme, for all its ambiguity, feels like a crack in the glass. A reminder that no amount of beauty, money, or spiritual alignment can keep the wilderness out. It crawls under skin, undeterred by filters or fame.

And so we return to that image—Bella, arm outstretched, IV in place, unsmiling. Not tragic, not brave, but simply… waiting. What is the cure for a sickness that thrives in mystery?

Or perhaps more importantly—who gets to tell us they’re sick, and still be believed?