Self portrait with the Sandias
Cyanoprint and Watercolour on Hand Dyed Fabric, 36’’x 54’’
“Illness creates dependence, which is culturally shameful. Being ill as a young person is especially countercultural and people don’t expect it or know how to help or respond. I got ill in my early 20s and the hardest and saddest part at that time was how the people closest to me responded and didn’t respond. The illusion of independence was really strong and no one was able to understand the kinds of help I needed. It’s heartbreaking when everyday after work, you are in severe pain and can’t use your arms and no one can or will come and help you get groceries or cook, despite the fact that you have friends that care about you. The cognitive dissonance is intense. It’s impossible to believe people really care about you when you have to give yourself another hour of severe pain to open a can. It cuts at your faith in friendship, community, humanity. I felt like I had fallen through a hole in the fabric of reality to a place where my life and needs didn’t matter and I was invisible.
I know fatigue intimately. There are different kinds and they are different from each other. There is a kind that is more like opiate withdrawal than regular tiredness: this profound discomfort in all areas of the body, inability to find comfort or rest. Sometimes it’s more like pain, sometimes more like heaviness, sometimes like nausea. Sometimes I am so tired I am even exhausted in my dreams, and I dream of being half asleep but not being able to fall asleep. Often in these dreams I have partial vision and I am trying with difficulty to complete a task as my senses decline. I’ve begun to be able to tell when the exhaustion is coming from my liver, from my adrenals, from my nervous system. Being chronically ill opens a whole world of new sensation and understanding. It’s tough because if we listen to our bodies, they tell us what we need to do to heal, and these actions are also what the earth needs us to do for them to heal. But, economic and oppressive forces often make it impossible for us to do those things as chronically ill individuals. For example, honoring interdependence, slowing down, stop working in a fast, dissociated way. We aren’t in much of a position to exert power over the culture, and the extent to which we are able to integrate these lessons into our own lives is often relative to the amount of privilege we can leverage to do so.
I think that the earth is speaking through us. I am ancestrally of Irish, English, Scottish, and French land. It has been so long since my people knew land-based lives, I grew up in London and there is hardly a trace of awareness of what came before all the waves of colonization that claimed the British Isles, or even what things were like before the industrial revolution. It’s so far in the past, in terms of time and more so broken generational links, its as though our ancestors never lived this way. Living on Turtle Island has changed my perspective because many of the peoples native to this land are keeping their traditions alive, despite settler colonialism’s best attempts to break the links between generations through kidnapping and coercing children away from their families. I am part of a generation of settlers who are becoming ancestrally aware again, who are learning that to heal ourselves and our world we have to look backwards through the generations and understand clearly what we have lost and what our people have done. I don’t know if my body will heal but I know that something will heal through me doing this work.”