I’m searching for like-minded chronic illness kin via my newsletter. I hope that with your help, this will become a gathering place for those interested in the healing power of community, compassion, and creativity.
In this newsletter, I explore what healing means to me as an organism inextricably intertwined with my environment. For what does healing mean in a world that feels like it is on fire? I also explore topics like the peculiar grief of having an illness that does not end, the pain and beauty of living in limbo, and how to balance both radical hope and radical acceptance.
More personally, I write to find my own way through the confusing and heart-wrenching mess of life. I write, to gather the threads of lessons I’ve gleaned along my journey and weave them into something bigger than myself. I write, to commune with my soul. And so, I write to heal.
I hope you’ll join me!
Explore what it means to heal
Newsletter Archive
“For those in the Northern Hemisphere, tonight is the Winter Solstice — the longest night of the year. I find my mind turning towards how darkness — both literal and metaphorical — takes its toll.”
“Chronic fatigue is one of those things that sounds simple, but is quite difficult to fully convey. When I try, like many others with ME/CFS, I’ve encountered disbelief, dismissal, impatience, and even outright hostility. I’ve heard things like: So what — we’re all exhausted. Get on with your life. You’re “just” depressed. It’s all in your head. Snap out of it.“
“I haven’t written here in a while because I caught a cold in October. It was “just” a bug, and yet in a chronically ill body there are often deeper cascading effects. Instead of a week or two of discomfort, I had all the usual miserable cold symptoms plus a full month of severe fatigue, muscle weakness and tremors, electric shocks, rashes, bone-deep pain, and more.”
“A few weeks ago, someone told me to put my hand over my heart and say the words: ‘I am healed.’ This person’s own heart was in the right place. Unlike many others I’ve encountered, she was not after my money, she deeply wanted to help me, and she genuinely believed in what she was saying.
And yet . . . “
“According to nearly every book I’ve read and every movie I’ve watched, there is a certain way one is supposed to be sick. The sick – especially sick women – are supposed to be sick gracefully. We are supposed to lay in our beds and pen memoirs and reconcile with our loved ones. We are supposed to quietly wring the meaning out of our suffering and then dispense our hard-won wisdom with the world.”
“There are a lot of ways to explain how I became so sick. Complex chronic illness for many is a combination of factors, from environmental toxins, to physical and psychological trauma, to stealth bacterial and viral infections, to parasites and more. But today, here, I want to tell a certain kind of origin story, rooted in the ways illness can manifest when we become sick in our souls.“
“These last 6 years have felt like their own kind of liminal space.
Like many of those with chronic illness, I’ve continually treaded the watery line between sick and well, between dependence on others and being able to live on my own. I keep swimming between doctor to doctor, odd job to odd job, place to place, in a desperate attempt to keep my head above water.”
“I once had a dream where I came upon a tiny bundle of feathers on the ground. I knelt down and cupped an impossibly light and soft body in my palms: a wingless hummingbird. As I held her up to my face, she gave a tiny, shuddering last breath, and went still.”
“Every day, I reckon with the ways my body cannot meet the demands of my heart. Some days, my unmet desires are small: to be free of pain for just an hour or two, to go for a long walk without landing in bed for days, to meet up with a dear friend despite not being able to keep my eyes open.”
“Until very recently, I’ve felt like a moth pupa wrapped up tightly in a cocoon. For years now, I have become gloopier, my edges blurred, as I sit inside a dark and enveloping experience no one can see but me. Illness is strongly associated with a journey into the underworld – a confrontation with our fragility and mortality as well as the shadows that lurk in the darkest corners of our bodies and our psyches.”
“Funnily enough, it all began with a toothache. It was 2019, and I was working for a humanitarian organization in Baghdad, Iraq. That one toothache led to a root canal from hell, involving multiple recurrent infections and 12+ appointments across 3 countries. Between the antibiotics, frequent illnesses, and subsequent unrelated injuries in my spine and shoulder, by mid-2020 I was in pretty bad shape.”
soulspunhealing.com 