Hi folks. I know it’s been a while since I posted anywhere online. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been offline; it’s been very hard to stay connected and stay in touch with people. Not just recently, but for a long time.
Those of you who are familiar with my work know that I live with various chronic illnesses and disabilities. I’ve made art and comics about them in the past. While they’ve often been challenging-but-manageable, last year took a serious toll on me. I spent the second half of 2022 getting sicker and sicker…until I dropped off the map around October/November. This past winter was the sickest I’ve ever been: my daily pain and exhaustion were impossible to deal with. I didn’t leave the house for months. Most days I couldn’t average 1-2 total minutes of standing up throughout the day. I couldn’t work at all. Even responding to texts and emails took so much out of me, mentally and physically, that I had to dedicate entire days to answering one message. (My mom thought I was in the hospital; I may as well have been.)
The causes of this extreme sickness were varied, but the primary factor was the constant stress, strain, and misery of working as a full-time freelance graphic novelist while disabled. Burnout doesn’t begin to cover it. I’ve been used as tinder since the moment I started working in this industry, and there’s no more to burn. I love comics to death and back, but the comics industry has done nothing but make me sicker and sadder.
It feels like an odd point in this post for me to say that I’m currently doing better than ever, but here we are!
Due to an unexpected side-effect of switching ADHD medications (because of the national Adderall shortage), my chronic illnesses have almost entirely quieted down. Did you know a small subset of people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome benefit enormously from long-term usage of the ADHD & narcolepsy drug Ritalin? Because I sure didn’t, until I found out I was one of them. The change in my daily capabilities has been downright astounding. Things I can do now, without any consequence to my health: standing up, climbing stairs, showering, exercise???, drawing, working, emailing people back, cleaning, housework, my laundry, going outside, all of the previously listed things in one day…the list goes on and on.
If you’ve never lived with chronic illness or in proximity to it, you may think, “okay, those are all normal things?” Which is exactly true. They are all normal things that I thought were increasingly out of my reach, as my illnesses got worse. I reasonably assumed I would need a caretaker (my spouse) for the rest of my life. I made a lot of compromises with myself, and I put my ambitions away.
I used to joke that God nerfed me, to keep things fair. (Classic crip humor, keeping things light when you have an almost always incurable medical condition, y’all get it.)
But now I’m un-nerfed. >:)
