Spells of Survival is monthly writing about the intersections of illness and magic, neurodivergence and myth making, resistance against the necrostate and re-enchanting our world. This ableist, individualist, capitalist world only values what is deemed useful, and then discards the moment it is considered to be broken or unable to perform and produce. But we are all here still. The sick. The human. The connected. The seers. The different. The needy. The unwilling to pretend. We navigate shitty care providers and medical gaslighting and difficulty getting diagnosis and endless unwanted advice. We live in a society steeped in ableism and entirely uninterested in the collective care we know is necessary. We live with ongoing and continual loss that is often overlooked and misunderstood, as we are told instead, we ought to be grateful and what do we have to complain about if we spend so much time in bed anyways? We live and dare I say we live fabulously well in all kinds of ways as our very lives divest from the normative assumptions of what makes a life valuable. I’m not here to write about how our lives as disabled folks or autistics or spoonies can still be valuable because we are still useful in some way, that we must prove our value via inspiration or overcoming odds. I'm here to give language to the myths we inherit and live, and to know that words are spells, to disturb and to comfort both.
That we want things only to use them, discard things after we use them, and call them waste is a terrible loss. The raw parts and pieces of our lives, of our bodies, of our wisdom, is the very place from where we make magic, practice magic, learn magic. Here, the way of the world is turned on its head. Here, we bend and bind. Here, we unearth and listen as if the world is in every way alive. Here, we care for the earth, we care for one another, we care for life, we care for the human and more than human worlds.
These are my spells of survival about the reality and the magic of being one of the discarded ones, one of the sick ones, one of the sensitive ones, one of the divergent ones, one of the rebellious ones. Incantations of love and justice. Elixirs of healing and radical care.
I’ll be writing here when I am able to monthly. As someone who lives with multiple chronic illnesses, dynamic disability and a neurodivergent brain that can make some days an overstimulation nightmare, this will be written in crip time. I will both be writing about crip time, and writing IN crip time. I promise that I will write here for us when I am able. And I hope you will want to open up it up in your own time. To read. To connect. To un-learn alongside me. To laugh in the way only those who know can laugh. To care. To mend. To be here.
I also host monthly spoonie video calls where we can all gather whenever and however we are and connect. Because I find those to be my favorite spaces.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
You don’t have to pay to subscribe. Because that’s a kind of classism that I can’t get behind. That being said, if you are one of those folks who does have the funds, the $5 a month to support me being able to write here and continue to host monthly spoonie calls, then that would mean a whole hell of a lot to me.
Stay in Touch
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Comment on posts if you want, like those old days of blogging if you were into that kind of thing. And I will write back when I can. We have so much to connect over.
About Me:
I am a queer and this means many things to me, about who I am and who I love and also how I am and how I see and bend things in this world.
I am a queer and this means many things to me, about who I am and who I love and also how I am and how I see and bend things in this world.
I also am a sick person. This began when I was thirty and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Though now officially cancer free, it began a series of ongoing illness and side effects that have changed every aspect of my life. I have multiple chronic illnesses, including ME/CFS, and arthritis which impacts mobility. I am dynamically disabled, which is a confusing thing to others most especially, sometimes even to myself. I am also neurodivergent and my brain works entirely differently than the disabling supremacy of this neurotypical world.
I value the necessity of slowness and the radical detours and dead ends my lived experience and body’s collapse came to require. I am entirely done with ideas that say we must forever prove our human worth. The living that comes from this place is different; and it is humanizing.
I don’t enjoy or do so well with small talk, so I’ll spare us both the pretense. But I do love intimacy and complexity and oftentimes profanity and sometimes sugar. So I will tell you those things instead. Because it is not that I don’t care about things; it's that I care deeply and irreverently. Just not always for the things told to us to be valuable in a world where conformity to a sick society is considered success.
I care about honoring our multitudes and all the contradictions we humans house and hold. I care about the quotidian, the right here, the countless collections of things all webbed and woven together that make up a life: the hum of neon, the call of secular prayers, the whirr of the box fan late at night when restless with wondering, unanswerable questions, bodies that break and still let us live, playing checkers by the pool knowing one day this will be only memory. I care about the collection of photo booth images of me and my son from all our road trips, and the dangers of groupthink, and abolition, and listening. I care about the making of things.
I hate the rhetoric around exceptionalism, the ableism embedded in ideals of overcoming obstacles as some sort of moral achievement and “rising to the occasion” the emblem of integrity. I hate the wellness industry, which implies it is solely the responsibility of individuals to work their own way out of the impact of structural harm and violence, rather than collective responsibility to dismantle systems themselves. I hate the gaslighting of self-help quotes and inspiration porn, that the only thing standing in the way is our own limited thinking. My own body tells a different story that I have come to trust and believe and this matters more to me than all the books written by all the experts put together.
I am not a good survivor and I don’t believe in being one.
I am devoted to the outcast, the outsider, the orphan, the harlot, the heathen, the stranger, the left behind and the forgotten, in myself and in the world.
I am for a radical acceptance of our humanity that does not pathologize, criminalize, or deny the impact of living these lives.
I’ve been at this being human thing long enough to know mostly how much I do not know, and I don’t claim the authority of possessing insight for others. So I am for the humanization of things turned inside out. I am here for breaking spells and casting spells. I am here for magic.
