When Monica Lewinsky names the “irony” of testing positive for COVID, she isn’t polishing a clever tagline; she’s staring down a story that once devoured her. The same culture that reduced her to a smirk and a punchline now instinctively reaches for the old script, as if the woman who lived through it is still just a meme in waiting. Her choice to speak from quarantine with a mix of humor, candor, and visible fatigue exposes how costly it is to live as a symbol instead of a person.

By writing through the isolation rather than disappearing into it, she quietly reclaims the camera that was pointed at her for decades. She shows the fragile body and the durable self, insisting that neither scandal nor sickness gets the final word. In that narrow space where a joke could easily erase her, she insists on context, compassion, and the radical idea that survival includes rewriting how the world remembers you.