It’s eight in the morning and I haven’t slept yet. In one corner of my room, I can hear the low rattle of my desktop mini fridge. In another corner, I can see the piercing green light from my air purifier. These, among other things, do not help me sleep. After more than a full …
My book can’t mean everything to everybody, but it can mean everything to me. And now it does.
It’s been a rough year. I think we can all agree on that, so I thought I’d share some good news—my health has been improving lately. The other day I got out of bed and stood up three times in the span of a few hours, the most I’ve done in my walking rehabilitation in …
If there’s one thing that I’ve struggled with the most while I’ve been sick, it’s finding a balance between doing things I enjoy and doing things that don’t make me sicker. It’s especially hard when almost everything I do either steals my energy, fills my muscles with pain, or makes me feel like I’m going …
My first job was working the front desk at a gym for minimum wage, long before disability rights were on my mind. I scanned member ID cards, re-racked weights, and cleaned the entire gym — wiping up people’s saliva from the sinks and their sweat off the treadmills, sanitizing the toilets and showers, and picking …
The need to speak my mind, and the heartache of not being able to, has only made the moment more palpable, more intense and full of emotion. But no amount of emotion is going to change my circumstances. No matter how hard I try, I can’t speak the words I want to say.
Last week I officially kicked off the campaign to publish my memoir, When Force Meets Fate. Originally I planned to call it Not Like The Whiskey, but I decided that was too obscure and not many people would get the significance. So I changed the memoir title and now we have When Force Meets Fate. It …
When chronic illness becomes a new kind of normal, it also becomes a cruel existence, one in which pain is a constant torture and exhaustion is as frequent as breathing.
Telling myself to not take my health for granted has always been a mental game I’ve played, an affirmation, perhaps even a mantra that I’ve repeated to make myself feel better about the fact that scary stuff can happen to anybody, at any time.
I could see all kinds of things that I had missed when I was stuck in my bed. I could feel the breeze swirling around me; I could see hummingbirds buzzing around a tree branch above the roof. I didn’t realize it until later, but it was the first time I had been outside in two years.