My Public Battle With Graves' Disease Nearly Destroyed Me
· Time
Post-birth-control syndrome. Bipolar disorder. Anxiety disorder. Clinical depression. Chronic fatigue. An intestinal parasite. Burnout. IBS.
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My doctors floated all of these potential diagnoses before arriving at the correct one. At my core, I knew none of them were right. But as my symptoms intensified, so did my self-doubt. I needed lucidity to advocate for myself while dealing with an illness that impaired it. I found out the heartbreaking way that a medically confused woman is rarely considered credible.
Women are often taught to distrust the severity of our own pain. I did, too.
At the very moment I was losing trust in my own body, I was publicly portraying a character defined by her resilience and endurance. On The Boys, a hit television show that uses the superhero genre to satirize celebrity, politics, and power, I play Annie January, also known as Starlight. She is one of the show’s only earnestly good superheroes. Playing Annie has meant more to me than I can ever articulate. But while filming our precious final season in 2025, I lost her. I lost myself.
The symptoms of my illness, still undiagnosed, created a distance between me and the character I had spent years pouring myself into. My memory was failing me. My body felt unfamiliar. My emotional presence, something I had always protected and valued fiercely as an actor, became increasingly difficult to access.
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It began subtly, around September 2023, when I was 29 years old: a deep fatigue that felt disproportionate to my schedule or workload. About two years later, that fatigue became incapacitating. I began sleeping through every alarm. On weekends, I would sleep 19 hours (or more) straight. The mood swings I had experienced years earlier intensified. My hands and feet became so weak and numb that walking began to feel dangerous. I developed heart palpitations and persistent urinary pain. But the most frightening symptom of all was the cognitive decline. My short-term memory deteriorated so severely that learning even simple lines became difficult—terrifying when you’re filming a television show.
Autoimmune diseases rarely manifest in the same way, person-to-person. The combination of the symptoms I experienced aren’t on cohesive lists online, which just added to my overwhelming confusion and fear at the time.
Eventually, my doctors referred me to a neurologist. By that point, I was preparing myself for the possibility that I was dying. I was in so much discomfort that the idea of death felt like a potential relief. Death felt less terrifying than living in that state indefinitely.
These symptoms struck me as I was filming the final season of The Boys and more in the public eye than ever. I was going through the physical hell of chronic illness on a public stage. Doing it in private is emotionally damaging enough, but to have my physical symptoms be speculated about, trivialized, and dismissed was devastating.
My symptoms persisted for years without a diagnosis. Then, one day in May 2025, while I was at work filming the tail end of the final season, my endocrinologist sent me an email with one line in it: “WE HAVE AN ANSWER!! I CAN HELP YOU!!” The email came after weeks of testing and specialist appointments, culminating in the antibody test that finally confirmed the diagnosis: Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition caused by an overactive thyroid. That was the day my life began again. Not because it instantly fixed everything, but because it finally gave shape to the chaos. It gave language to suffering that had gone on for years. It gave me an answer.
But even the right diagnosis and treatment could not erase the trauma I endured searching for them. On August 1, 2025, months after beginning treatment, I was hospitalized following a severe mental-health crisis. Ironically, I was not hospitalized at the height of my illness, but in the aftermath. The initial relief I felt once treatment began working slowly gave way to something else entirely: the realization of how absent from myself I had been for the previous two years. I had been hormonally dysregulated, cognitively impaired, and psychologically untethered for so long that recovery didn’t bring me peace. It brought me clarity. And for me, clarity arrived carrying grief. Grief for the time I could not get back. For what this illness had taken from me professionally, creatively, relationally, psychologically. I spent at least two years of my life physically present but mentally unreachable. My grief hit me so hard that there was a moment I was unsure I could carry it. Autoimmune disease does not exclusively exist in our bodies. When your hormones, nervous system, cognition, sleep, and sense of identity have been disrupted for long enough, the psychological consequences are not secondary. They are part of the illness, too.
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Treatment has brought so much of me back, physically and emotionally, but recovery has been anything but linear. It has been a constant process of learning to listen to my body instead of overriding it. I used to equate strength with endurance. My identity was wrapped up in pushing through exhaustion and discomfort, remaining productive no matter the cost. But endurance is not the same thing as health. Self-sacrifice is not the same thing as resilience. I used to think strength meant remaining untouched by hardship. Now, a year into treatment, I think it means allowing yourself to be changed by it.
What has galvanized me into speaking so openly about my relationship with Graves’ disease is the understanding that none of this should have felt so shocking or isolating. But illnesses that disproportionately affect women are still too often minimized, misunderstood, or exaggerated. Silence has consequences. Ignorance does, too. And so, remaining silent about this is no longer an option for me.
I hope the transparency surrounding my symptoms can help even one person catch their illness earlier than I caught mine. The body speaks long before it screams. Listen to yourself before your body is forced to scream loud enough for the world to hear it, too.