STAIA

Stacy Schumann - Writer, researcher | Exploring the intersection between medicine, identity and repair. Formerly Well Scent. Launching ETIEN 2025/ 2026.

Olfactory futures. Genderless form. Post wellness dispatches on Substack.

09/03/2025

Right relationship in medicine is not built on speed or performance.
It is built on presence — on believing patients first, listening without rushing to fix, and co-creating care instead of extracting it.

✨ My new essay on Substack takes this further — exploring how care becomes repair when we honor complexity and move beyond the illusion of “optimization.”

[link in bio]

09/01/2025

The Performance of Health is now live on Substack. It explores medical trauma, the survival performance demanded by care, and what it means to reclaim presence.

A STAT News editor recently called my writing on this subject “powerful.” This piece carries that same urgency.

💬 Have you ever performed health in order to be believed?

For me, it once looked like laughing at a cruel comment in a doctor’s office, just to stay in the room. It looked like sitting upright when I was dizzy, masking panic so I wouldn’t be dismissed.

Writing this essay was my way of saying: I don’t do that anymore. 
Have you witnessed this in your own life or with loved ones?

Full essay: link in bio (I’ll also drop it in the comments).

08/31/2025

This space once held my work with Well Scent. That chapter is complete.

Now, this page is where I share my writing — fragments, quotes, and essays on medicine, identity, and repair.

If you’ve been here since the Well Scent days, thank you. If you’re new, welcome. Either way, you’re invited to stay only if these words feel like home. Presence here should feel like resonance, not obligation.

If you do stay, I’d love to know who you are. If you’re staying, will you leave a word or wave, so I know you’re here? Engagement helps me see you, and it teaches this platform to keep showing my words to the people who want them.

And if this is no longer your place, unfollow with love. Social media works best when it reflects true connection.

Thank you for meeting me here — in this new chapter. 🤗

08/27/2025

Health is not a lifestyle brand. When wellness is packaged and sold, those without privilege are left behind. Real care lives in equity, access, and community. What does care beyond commerce look like to you?

08/25/2025

Lately I’ve been noticing how often care is performed rather than lived. I don’t want friendship theatre; I want verbs. Love, as action. Friendship, as practice. Have you noticed this in your own life?

08/20/2025

If your health advice only works for the privileged, it’s not health — it’s performance.

08/16/2025

This is my first post here as Stacy Schumann. I write at the intersection of medicine, identity, and repair.

My first Substack essay, The Performance of Health, is coming soon — it was recently called “powerful” by an editor at STAT News. Subscribe via the link in my bio to be the first to read it.

07/22/2025

Chronic illness often reveals itself not just in symptoms, but in the silence it draws around us. We stop talking about legacy, about summer plans. Instead, we inhabit a landscape shaped by loss and invisibility. Our pain becomes something to sidestep, to erase. ⁣
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As setbacks accumulate—hospitalizations, surgeries, new diagnoses—what disappears is not always love, but structure. Not outright rejection, but the slow, quiet erosion of the social scaffolding that should hold us up. ⁣
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In this liminal space, we learn to perform health just to stay tethered to others. At its best, it reads as optimism. At its worst, it deepens the isolation. We hide our truth—not to deceive, but to make others more comfortable. ⁣
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Chronic illness asks us to reimagine connection—not around comfort, but around truth. The landscape may not be “normal,” but it is rich in ways most will never fully understand. It is hard won wisdom born of the ashes.

Address

Austin, TX

Website

https://substack.com/@stacyschumann?r=dap4e&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

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